Sam Crandall stepped into the huge expanse of the living room—or should it be called a salon, or by some other grand name that applied to rooms not found in the average house? The room was big, almost as large as the main room in Phillipe's place. But even if it had been a tenth the size, Suzanne Jantille's living room would have been overwhelming. The blond-wood floors, oriental carpet, the cream-colored walls, restrained pastel paintings, and very grand upright chairs and sofas all seemed to register a certain disapproval of Sam.

The room's perfectly coordinated cream-and-white color scheme seemed to chide Sam's choice of a summer-green skirt and beige blouse as hopelessly overstated. Everything about the room was relentlessly perfect, carefully chosen to match every other thing, achieving an overall effect of such perfect harmony that any outside element was bound to clash.

Sam sat down on the rather grand and formal couch, feeling a bit nervous. She shifted in her seat and knitted her hands together nervously, watching as Suzanne-Remote gracefully crossed to the sofa opposite and sat. Sam tried to smile at her host and was rewarded with a rather wooden nod in return. Was that the best the remote could do? No way to know. Sam found herself thinking back to how her mother had handled company, how hard she had always worked to put visitors at ease. It must be tough to set a guest at ease in a room like this, Sam thought. Then it occurred to her that at ease was the last thing in the world Jantille would want Sam to be. In a house this big, there had to be other, less imposing rooms available for the reception of guests. A breakfast nook, a den, a sun room, something. Jantille had chosen this room for the express purpose of keeping Sam off balance.

Well, that was worth knowing, anyway. Sam shook

her head to herself. It told her a little bit about the tone this interview was likely to take. "Let's get started, shall we?" she asked, pulling out her notetaker.

"Fine/' Suzanne-Remote said. The expressionless calm on Suzanne's plastic face somehow seemed a bit warmer now, but Sam decided she must be imagining things.

Sam thought back to her visit with Phillipe, remembering the denuded head of the remote there. Unzip this, unscrew that, peel back those layers, and the urbane, elegant lawyer she was talking with would look like that grinning skull. She shivered, but then forced the thought away. It was time to get down to business. "All right, then. Maybe it's not quite on the subject, but there's a side issue I'd like to ask about first. How did it feel for you to get back into a courtroom? You'd been away a long time."

Suzanne tilted her head to one side, as if in surprise. She thought for a moment. "Good," she said at last. "Perhaps a bit unsettling, but that was part of what made it exciting. This case is a tough one on any number of levels. There's uncertainty in it. I've always felt a bit of exhilaration in heading out into unknown territory. Here we've got a case where virtually none of the facts are in doubt, and yet almost every issue is in doubt. If that doesn't force you to be on your toes, I don't know what would."

"So you prefer this sort of challenge to a cut-and-dried case."

Suzanne nodded. "Most people seem to assume that lawyers like simple cases, the ones with straightforward questions. But it's the doubts, the uncertainties that give us a job in the first place. If it were always readily apparent who was right and who was wrong, we wouldn't need lawyers. And any trial lawyer who says she or he doesn't enjoy a good fight is lying

Nice quote, Sam thought It would look good in the f, hut it sounded a hit rehearsed. Maybe it she twitted lantille a bit, her mbjeci would reward Sam with

something a bit juicier. "Let's be real here, for a second/' Sam said. "I can't quite buy what you're saying about doubt."

"What do you mean?" Suzanne asked.

"Nine times out of ten, by the time a case gets to trial everyone knows perfectly well what happened. Don't the lawyers—defense lawyers in particular—earn their keep by trying to manufacture uncertainty?"

Suzanne Jantille sat up a bit straighter and frowned. "I'm afraid I don't understand."

Or don't wish to understand, Sam thought, a bit viciously. " 'Beyond a reasonable doubt,' " she quoted. "Isn't that the key to it? There are a million things that happen every day, and we all know they happened—but you couldn't prove they did. Especially not if someone else came along looking for a way to introduce that reasonable doubt."

"I used to play that game with myself," Suzanne said, with something a bit cautious about her voice. "Back when I was just beginning to try cases."

"What game?"

"Well, let me give an example." She paused and thought for a moment. Suddenly the remote gave off a strange barking sort of noise without moving its mouth. It flailed its arms about convulsively, in an awkward and mechanical spasm of movement. Whatever illusion of humanity it had shown vanished, at least for the moment. It looked like a robot, and a malfunctioning one at that. "Excuse me," it said, in an echo of Suzanne's voice that was suddenly a bit raspy. "It would appear I'm developing a bit of a cold, and my remote insists on echoing my cough in full sound and action, even if it doesn't do it very well. The facial controls weren't programmed to cough, and the cough reflex confuses the induction controllers. Let me get some water."

Well, okay, Sam told herself, maybe it had sounded like a cough, but it sure didn't look like one. Strange that such a commonplace sound would seem so bizarre just because the visual cues didn't match it. Let her get some

water and get on with it. Sam half expected the machine to stand up and head for the kitchen, but instead the remote suddenly froze up, stopped moving altogether. After a moment, she understood. Somewhere in the house, Sam knew, a drinking tube was extruding itself toward the paralyzed woman's mouth, and she was sucking water through it to clear her throat. Just as well the machine did cut out. It would have been doubly disconcerting to see the remote turn its head and wrap its mouth around an imaginary straw as it echoed Suzanne's movements.

There was another strange noise from the remote, a bit more subdued, and with the spasming absent altogether. Suzanne was clearing her throat. "That's better. But anyway, I was talking about my imaginary cases. They were a bit silly, but I suppose everyone has private little games they play in their heads. I'd be walking along the street in the city, all sorts of other people around, and suddenly I'd find myself picking out a couple of random strangers, turn one into a criminal and the other into a victim. I'd ask myself, suppose the man fifty feet ahead of me stole that lady's purse? Could I identify him? Could I precisely indicate the spot it happened in? And the time? And if so, how could I prove it, nail time and place down. If the purse were produced in evidence, would I be able to identify it? Or else I'd make it more direct, and make myself the victim—or the criminal. No, scratch that—I'd play the plaintiff's and suspect's viewpoints." Clearly, she had remembered she was talking to a reporter. "Plaintiffs and victims, suspects and criminals, are all very different things. Make sure you clean that quote up for me, all right?" she asked, a note of concern in her voice.

"Of course," Sam said, trying to sound encouraging and reassuring. It was an old trick of the trade. If the reporter could get the interview subject to rely on the reporter's discretion, then the subject would be more likely to he indiscreet herself.

But that voice. Strange, fearfully strange to know

there was a real woman, somewhere in this house, speaking those words to no one, into a microphone in an empty room. "Go on/' Sam said.

"Well, the idea was to find out what the various parties would say," Suzanne continued. "What would be the likely points of agreement? What details would be likely to get mixed up? Who could lie about what and get away with it, in the face of whatever other evidence existed in the case? What would their motives be for lying and telling the truth?

"Then, once I had the whole thing together in my mind, I'd try to take it all apart again, make it so all the pretty pieces I had strung together didn't fit together anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"I'd take the whole thing into the courtroom, and play all the parts at once, in my head. Judge, jury, prosecutor, defense counsel, plaintiff, suspect, witnesses. I'd imagine myself as a witness, and cross-examine myself. How did I know the time? How could I swear my client was the assailant when I only got a brief glimpse at him? There are a hundred stores selling purses just like that one. How could I be sure that the one produced in evidence was the one you saw? And then I'd go back again, play the prosecutor's side of the chess game again. That's how I taught myself something so I'd know it instinctively, in my gut: lawyers don't worry about what happened—they worry about what they can prove, or what proofs they can dismantle. Every time I played the mind game, I'd realize after a while that I wasn't thinking about the hypothetical crime at all anymore—but about the case for and against the crime."

"Isn't that pretty much the same thing?" Sam asked.

"No, not at all. It's something very different," Suzanne said, her voice and posture betraying her enthusiasm. "You were talking about it yourself a minute ago. Manufacturing certainty and uncertainty. That's what lawyers do. We take the facts of the case, try and hide the facts that weaken our side, dispute them where we can.

••••w

Wc overstate the facts that make our side seem strong. We try to make the witnesses seem smart or stupid honest or misleading, confident or confused, as suits our turn. Meanwhile opposing counsel is playing the same hand from the other side, while the judge keeps an eye on how far we bend the rules. Then the jury decides who pulls in the chips."

"You make it sound more like a poker game than a court of law," Sam said. She thought back to what Peng had told her. The words had been different, but the tone had been much the same. Cynicism wasn't quite the word for it, for they both believed in what they were doing. But they both had a strange double vision of how they did their jobs. Seeing it half in cold-blooded detachment, and half as a game they loved to play.

"It is a poker game," Suzanne said. "Bluffing, counterbluffing, raising the stakes, folding when your hand isn't worth the risk, blowing a good hand now and then because your nerve fails or you misread something." She thought for a moment, and then spoke again. "There's another point that makes the poker analogy even stronger: Any hand can win, any hand can lose. You can be holding a royal flush and be forced to fold if you don't have enough chips to keep up with the betting. And five random cards can win if you can hide your weaknesses well enough, and intimidate the other player with tough betting."

"So what do the cards you got dealt look like?" Sam asked. "And what are you using for chips?"

Suzanne-Remote's expressionless face did not betray any reaction, but her head cocked to one side, and she waved an admonishing finger at Samantha. "Never show your cards till you're called, and never show your whole stake."

"All right then," Sam said. She hadn't expected anything more than that. "What do you think of the way Peng is playing his hand?"

"Damned if I know."

"He made some strong claims aboul being able to

prove Herbert's humanity—and his guilt/' Sam said. "Are you saying you don't believe he has that proof?"

"I can't answer that one way or the other/' Suzanne said.

Sam hesitated for a long moment, and then decided to plunge in. "I've got a friend, my source on a lot of this story. I put in a call to him this morning, and he confirmed that he didn't see any such evidence."

Suzanne leaned in toward Sam. There was something a bit anxious about the movement, as if she had been hoping to hear something to such an effect.

"Did he have good access to the evidence?" Suzanne asked. "Would he know what he was looking for?"

"He's very good at this sort of thing," Sam said, a bit cautiously. She looked hard at Suzanne. "You don't think Herbert's human," she said at last. She could read that much from Suzanne. "Or at least, you're not sure, one way or the other."

"I certainly—"

"I wasn't asking a question," Sam said. "And you sure as hell won't let me quote you on that point. But I can see it, plain as day. You're not sure."

Suzanne slumped back a little. "Off the record, utterly and totally off the record, I'm not. How could I be? Up until the time of his arrest, it had never entered my head that he was anything but a perfectly ordinary machine. But since then—I've changed my mind a hundred times. I've noticed him doing things that just aren't what robots do."

A light came on in Sam's head. "That's what my friend showed me, too. Unrobotic behavior. It's just struck me that if the job were to prove Herbert wasn't a robot things would be a lot easier."

"But a lot of things that aren't robots aren't human, so that's not much help," Suzanne said. She leaned in closer again, and spoke in low, confiding tones. "This friend of yours, this source. You know there are questions I can't answer, and I know there are things you can't do. You can't reveal a source without the source's

permission. But I need some help right now. I need to see the evidence, and get some analysis on it—and get a private, expert opinion on Herbert. Your friend sounds like he might be able to do all those things, and sounds like he might be sympathetic to our side. Do you think he or she might agree to meet me?"

Sam looked hard into Suzanne-Remote's plastic eyes. This was the moment. Here was the time and place where she decided clearly and precisely whether she merely wanted to report this story, or whether she wanted to become part of it. Make the news instead of simply telling about it.

Reporters were supposed to be observers, not doers. But no worthy reporter had ever worked who did not believe that things had to be changed, turned upside down, sometimes.

If she sat silent now, she could tell herself that she had done the right things, behaved in accordance with the standards of journalistic ethics. Her conscience would be clear.

And maybe Herbert would be condemned to death, and a whole class of people would be made into second-rate citizens for all time to come.

Or else she could speak the name, and damn the rules and do what was right, instead of what satisfied the norms.

She thought back to the original arrest, and wondered, not for the first time, how Phillipe's service as the arresting officer had been arranged.

"I think I can arrange it/' Sam said at last. "As a matter of fact, I believe you've already met him."

CHAPTER 10 SCHRODINGER'S ROBOT

"There isn't any point to this/' Suzanne Jantille-Remote said, staring into the daylight that sped past the windows of her relay van. "My husband is dead. None of these games will change that fact."

She shouldn't say things like that to a reporter, Sam thought. Suzanne Jantille's mood had darkened, and she was talking far less cautiously. Sam knew, somehow, that as a reporter she should be taking advantage of Jantille's moodiness to get more information, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. For once, behaving with a bit of human decency was higher on her list. "My friend doesn't think he's dead," Sam said.

"My husband died three months ago, and no evidence manufactured by the U.S. Attorney will change that fact," Suzanne said. Sam noticed there was a slight quaver to Suzanne's voice, as if she was in some pain or discomfort and was trying to hide it.

Sam turned her eyes back to Herbert. His massive bulk was crowding up the interior of the relay van. His size was just a trifle intimidating, to say the least, and her overactive imagination would insist on reminding her that this machine had quite probably killed someone. At

the very least he had been there when the death happened. By accident or design, whether Herbert was a sentient being or a mere pile of hardware, he had been there when the breath of life left David Bailey's body. That was plain fact never mind the legal niceties about whether he could be held to account for it.

Sam settled back into her seat as best she could. Here she was being driven around by a robotic vehicle, her only companions two robots, one a possible killer and the other a puppet on the string of a paralyzed and highly agitated woman. It was an incongruous situation, but for some reason Sam found it more than odd. It was downright disturbing, and she could not think why.

Then it came to her. For the first time in her life, she was aware of the fact that she was in a place where humans were not in the majority. No doubt she had been surrounded by robots before in her life—she could think of a half-dozen moments right off the top of her head. But she had never been worried by it before, never before been disturbed.

Now it dawned on her that her sort, the ruling class of flesh-and-blood, was potentially the weaker party. The human world would not function at all without the cyborgs and robots and HTMs and lesser machines doing all the dirty and unpleasant work. What would happen if the members of society not accepted as fully human decided to watch out for themselves instead of doing the bidding of humans?

Sam was shocked even to realize such a thing was remotely possible, that the present arrangement was not immutable. How often before in history had someone stumbled across the idea? What had it felt like to be an Englishman of the Indian Raj in the 1930s when he suddenly realized the Indians outnumbered his kind a hundred to one? Or an American slave owner in 1865, at the exact moment when war ended and the slaves were slaves oo

Sam frowned. Why was she thinking in terms of o\ ei -and peoples being made free. 1 Was thai what robots

and cyborgs were? Slaves? But slaves were oppressed people. Were robots people, could robots be people, should they be free? Would they, inevitably, someday, be free, and powerful?

For the briefest flicker of time, Sam saw a future. Not the time that would be, but the time that might be—and it was a deeply unsettling place. It was Julia Entwhistle's vision, as described by Ted Peng, a world overrun by the rich who refused to die, encased in their flawless mechanical bodies.

Sam looked at the big HMU robot hunkered down on the other side of the van. It might or might not be that the Feds were wrong about Herbert for now, but they wouldn't be wrong forever.

Sam looked at Suzanne-Remote. Such compromises as remotes and cyborgs were mere stopgaps, temporary solutions while technology matured. Sooner or later, dead minds would be fully and accurately recorded into bodies of metal and plastic. And those bodies would never have to die. The mechanical survivors of death would accumulate, their numbers always growing, until . . .

Sam blinked and came back to herself. Until it would always be like this moment here, with the flesh-and-blood people in the minority. Until one day the flesh-and-bloods looked up to realize that the robot-bodied populace was already gaining control, had already gone past being people and become something else.

It was not a new idea, not at all. People had been discussing such things for years, decades. But riding in this van with a pair of machines she was supposed to treat like people brought it home, made it real, immediate, personal.

Sam shivered. She did not want that world. She wanted people around, wanted her children to live and die having fingers and toes, bruised knees and broken hearts. People were meant to have lives, not battery packs or cable assemblies or memory downloads.

But Suzanne had said her client was not a human, not

a person. She wasn't seeing that world. "Do you really believe your husband is dead?" Sam asked. Suddenly the question was vitally important. She needed to know what Suzanne thought a person was. "Woman to woman, no quotation, you're not a lawyer and I'm not a reporter. Do you, right now, believe it?"

"I sometimes wonder if I'm alive," Suzanne said. "I can forget my own living body so completely, become so involved in the job of controlling this robot body, that I begin to think of myself as a machine. But that doesn't answer your question, does it. Is David alive or dead?" Suzanne thought for a moment and then shook her head. "The things Peng said at the hearing about David becoming a new person ring true to me, and that scares the hell out of me. I'm not the same person I was before —before I turned into this/' Suzanne gestured with her left arm, down at her body. "And I still have the same number of arms and legs, I'm still using the same brain I used to have. But if David did put his mind in Herbert, none of that is true for him. How could he not be different?"

Suzanne thought for a minute, and then spoke again. " 'Is David alive?' That seems like a single, very simple question. But I've been thinking about it, and I've concluded that two very complicated questions are hiding inside it.

"First— is there someone alive inside Herbert, or is he merely malfunctioning in some odd and subtle way? Second—if there is someone alive in there, was he once David Bailey, is he David now, and if not, who is hel"

Suzanne looked at Sam, but there was nothing for the younger woman to say.

Suzanne shook her head and looked over at Herbert. "If your friend can answer all those questions, I'll be very impressed with him indeed."

Suzanne Jantille made hci way into the elevator with a fair degree of nervousness, following Herbert and Sam

Crandall. It wasn't just the building, though the place was strange and disconcerting in its own right. At least the place had a decent hookup for her relay van, surprising in an old popdrop condo in this part of town. What bothered her was Samantha Crandall's flat refusal to say who they were going to see. Crandall had even said her friend had met Suzanne. But then what reason could there be for the secrecy—especially as all would be revealed as soon as their host opened the door? Suzanne was getting the idea from Sam that the reporter feared Suzanne would refuse to see the person if she knew who it was.

The elevator arrived at its destination and the three of them stepped out into a good-sized vestibule. Sam led them to the one door at the far end of the hall and it opened as they approached.

A dark-featured, handsome young man stood in the doorway, dressed in a plain tan shirt and slacks. But he did look familiar. There was something about him that—

"Good God. You're the one who arrested him," she said in shock. Suzanne turned toward Sam accusingly. Now she could understand the reporter's reluctance to give a name. "This is the friend who's going to help Herbert?"

But before Sam Crandall could speak, the policeman did, in a low, calm voice full of confidence. "The name's Phillipe Sanders, ma'am. On duty I do what I'm told. I'm off duty now. I'm not spying for anyone or looking to spring any traps. I'm just a guy who knows robotics who might be able to give you a hand. And if yQu don't want my help, you don't have to take it. But are you likely to get many other offers before the hearing reconvenes?"

Suzanne's head swiveled around sharply, with the click and whir of mechanical precision, with no attempt to disguise the movement as something human and graceful. She stood motionless for an endless moment, staring at her host, glittering plastic eyes boring into him. Phillipe returned her gaze calmly, steadily.

Sam watched the two of them, feeling very much

afraid, though she was not sure of what. Forces were coming together here, gathering themselves to look into new places, to look for a lost soul where no soul had ever been.

All three of them were breaking the rules of their respective professions, just by coming together. Sam was supposed to report the news, not create it. Reporters weren't supposed to interfere. Cops weren't supposed to help defense lawyers, and certainly weren't supposed to meet secretly with lawyers involved in cases they had busted. And defense lawyers most definitely were not supposed to receive stolen evidence files from cops.

At last Suzanne stepped forward, through the door, and Phillipe backed up, letting her through. Herbert and Sam followed behind. Sam breathed a sigh of relief. It was too late now. The deed had been done, and they had all done it together.

The place looked nothing like the way it had the last time Sam had been here. All the furniture, all the storage cabinets, all the worktables, were just as they had been— but the light of day was pouring in the high windows from the blue sky, banishing any illusion of mystery or strangeness. It was an ordinary place, a workshop where a man repaired machines. Even the dust cloths draped over the machines on the workbenches looked perfectly normal. No ghosts looming out at her today.

Sam looked toward one particular spot on one particular table, and made damn sure there was no shrouded shape sitting there. Good. The remote unit Phillipe had been working on—the remote that Phil's father had used —was missing. In fact, everything had been cleared from that one table. Either Phillipe had sold or donated the remote already, or else he had hidden it away, having the good sense to keep Suzanne from seeing it. It could not be a pleasant thing to see your fellow being half taken apart.

Phillipe stepped ahead of the others and walked into the center of the workroom. He stood by the empty

worktable, turned, and looked at his visitors. "Okay/' he said, "where do we start?"

Suzanne cocked her head in surprise. "I thought you would know."

"All I got was one quick phone call from Sam, saying she was bringing you here," Phil said. "Nothing else. What is it you want?"

"Help," Suzanne said simply, looking steadily at him. Phillipe leaned back on the workbench and folded his arms on his chest. Distrust and suspicion hung heavy in the air.

"Help with what?" he asked.

"With Herbert, obviously," Suzanne said, her voice irritable. Suddenly she was caught up in another coughing fit, this one just as spasmodic and disconcerting as the one Sam had seen at Suzanne's house.

Sam had seen it before, and yet it still startled her. Phil, on the other hand, was clearly more concerned than surprised. All the curtness came out of his voice, and he stepped toward her, but stayed clear of her flailing arms. Obviously he was familiar with robotic strength, and did not want to get in its way when it was out of control. He waited until the fit was past, and then stepped closer, his face worried. "Madame Jantille, are you all right?"

"Yes, fine. No problem at all. Just a slight cough."

"No, ma'am, that cough was a lot more than slight. Are you taking proper care of your bio-body?" he asked, a bit severely.

"What business is it of yours?" Suzanne asked angrily, stepping back from Phillipe, moving a bit stiffly.

"None," Phillipe said evenly. "Except that my father was a remote person, and he died of a slight cough. It was advanced double pneumonia by the time he finally admitted there was something wrong."

"You sound just like my tech-nurse," Suzanne said impatiently.

"Well, maybe you should listen to both of us," Phillipe said.

THE MODULAR MAN

:hc devil would you know about it?" Suzanne demanded.

Sam drew in her breath and stared at the two of them, the remote unit and the man, standing still as statues, glaring at each other. At last Phil spoke, and broke the moment.

out it because it's my business," Phillipe said. "Because dealing with robots is what I do." am not a robot," Suzanne said.

"No, ma'am, and that is exact! :nt. You feel

yourself to be in this body in front of me now, strong and healthy and capable. And this remote body in front of me is all those things. But it is not you in front of me. It is a machine. You are home, alone, with a bad cold if not something worse. An illness of some sort that you are struggling to ignore because you have enough weaknesses and vulnerabilities in your life without admitting a new one."

There was something in Phil's tone, in the passion and the feeling of his words, that seemed to disarm Suzanne.

well then. I will take your words under ac ment. I will talk -nurse tomorrow, and do

whatever he tells :h that said, can we return to

the question of Herbert?"

/anne's surrender seemed to disarm Phillipe right back s. Of course," he said. "But can you tell me

exactly what son of help you want from me?"

Two things," Sam said, speaking for the first time, •e if the words came from her, the anger in this room would back off a ways. Both Phil and Suzanne turned and looked at her, seemingly surprised to see her there. Sam found it most disconcerting that they had both forgotten her presence. "I think there are things we need Phil" Sam repeated in a firmer voice, as if staking out her right to speak. "We need to know if David Bailey is in there, and we need to figure out what the I rney's evidence of murder is."

"Or if it exists at all," Phil said thoughtfu:

Suzanne nodded. "So I'm not the only one thinking that might be a bluff?"

"It might well be. I've been chewing it over, and either it's a bluff and the data files I got access to—the ones Sam based her story on—have been manipulated, or else the evidence is there, in the data, but I've overlooked it."

"What's the odds on your data being manipulated?" Sam asked. "Maybe your source is yanking your chain. What chance of that?"

Phil shook his head. "Next to zero. Not with my source."

"And who might that be?" Sam said, knowing damn well she shouldn't be asking that question.

Phil rubbed his hand over his chin and shrugged. "I might as well tell you and save you lots of guessing. But if it gets in the paper, my source's head comes off, and so does mine—and I'll see to it you and Madame Jantille get pulled down too. That clear? I need it kept quiet/'

"Perfectly. I'll keep quiet," Sam said. "Madame Jantille?"

"I will honor your confidence," she said in a careful, formal voice. "I will not reveal what you tell me. And anyone who's trying to tap my communications back and forth between here and my home is going to have some problems. Everything is shielded and encrypted."

Phil hesitated a moment longer and then plunged in. "Okay then. It was the chief of police."

"Good God." Suzanne was stunned.

Sam was just as surprised, but after half a second's thought, it made sense to her. After all, the chief did not care for Entwhistle. "Wait a second, Phil," she said. "I need details on this. How did it work? The chief didn't just waltz up to you and say 'Here, Phil, here's a package of evidence to suborn.' "

"No, of course not," Phil said a bit stiffly. "But if you're not going to reveal what I tell you, why the hell do you need details?"

"Because she needs to know if you're telling a convincing story," Suzanne said, recovering quickly from

her own surprise. "You're breaking a hell of a lot of rules meeting with us. And Sam's got to be wondering if you've been instructed to break those rules as a way to set us up. Entwhistle could use this meeting to get me thrown off the case."

Phil looked at each of his visitors in turn, his gaze ending up on Sam. She found to her surprise that she had a little trouble returning it. "Nice to be trusted," Phil said at last. "But I guess I can see the need, looking at it from your direction. I think I know the chief's reasons for what he did. He didn't like the case, and he didn't trust Entwhistle, and he did not want a precedent set that his cops would be forced to go out and arrest cyborgs on charges of staying alive—which is, when you come right down to it, what this is all about. Entwhistle has charged your husband with the crime of not dying. If she can make that a crime under certain circumstances, all she has to do is widen the circumstances and anyone who needs a machine to live is in trouble."

"That thought had crossed my mind. But why would that idea upset Chief Thurman enough that he would leak confidential police information? He's not a cyborg. Surely he's had to enforce other laws he didn't approve of."

"Yes, he has. But this goes beyond that. This is a question of making law, setting precedents. Right now, Entwhistle is trying to establish that doing what she thinks David Bailey tried to do is a crime. It is by no means yet established that such is the case. My guess is that the chief is trying to prevent it from coming to pass."

"You're talking like a lawyer all of a sudden," Suzanne said, something a bit less intimidating about her manner. "But I can't believe Thurman just called you into his office and said, 'Here, Sanders, go out and break the law.

No, ol course not/' Phil said. "He came to me at the repair yard, the night before the arrest."

'The chief came Sam asked, astonished

"It was quieter that way," Phil explained It I had

been called to his office, it would've been all over the yard the next morning. But everyone knows Thurman likes to wander around his commands once in a while, just pop up and see how things are going. So he dropped by the yard, and no one paid much attention."

"And?"

"And he handed me a datacube and told me my sergeant was going to pull me off tech detail to make a bust next day. One that would involve robotics. He wanted an expert there to make the pinch, just to make sure no one screwed the pooch," Phil went on, unconsciously shifting from legalese to cop slang. "And he handed me the cube, and told me to read up on the case."

"And that's all?" Suzanne protested. "Out of that you read that the chief of police wants you to start leaking indictment files to the press?"

"That's plenty," Sam broke in. "What the hell else was he expecting Phil to do? He had to have pulled Phil's file, learned something about him first. He must have known that you were sympathetic to cyborgs and remotes and robots."

"So he sends you in to sabotage the arrest," Suzanne said.

"No, ma'am," Phil said firmly. "You were there, you must have played the recordings back. You of all people should know that I rescued that arrest. If Johnson had gone in alone, she would have cocked it up six ways from Sunday. You could have gotten the whole damn thing thrown out five minutes after you walked into court. If he wanted a crash-and-burn bust, he would have sent Johnson in alone. The chief had to know that about me, too—that I do a job right if I'm going to do it at all."

"Except you don't mind leaking evidence when it suits your turn," Suzanne said.

"Hold it a minute," Sam protested. "You're here to ask Phil's help. He doesn't deserve to be treated like a hostile witness on the stand."

"No, it's all right, Sam," Phil said. "She's got to under-

stand my motives in all this, trust them—or she'd be crazy to let me near Herbert with a screwdriver."

Suzanne ignored the interruption. "Let's go back to what you think the chief wanted of you. You said it wasn't a sabotaged arrest. What do you think he wanted instead?"

"Well I didn't get a chance to finish telling you about my talk with the chief. He didn't say go out and leak this information. But he did say that he would count on me to see to it that the defendant was on a level playing field/' said Phil. "He said that there were some serious manipulations of the process happening. Things done not in the name of justice but of winning at any cost. He said that wasn't right, that the police had the same duty as anyone else in law enforcement to look out for the rights of the accused."

"That's quite a statement from the chief of police/' Sam said.

"Chief Thurman is quite a guy," Phil said.

Sam looked at her friend, and considered his words. There was obvious admiration in his voice when he spoke of the chief. It was clear that Phil's loyalty to the man was the driving force here, the factor that had made him willing to break the rules, take the chances he was taking. Phil was doing this, at least in pan, because he believed in Thurman, and trusted his motives far enough to do his unspoken bidding.

But Sam had a little trouble seeing a police chief, even an honest and dedicated one, working solely from altruistic motives. There had to be more to Thurman than that, and it made her uncomfortable to think Phil might think otherwise. To her practiced eye, n was obvious that Thurman had carefully arranged matters to provide himself with deniability. Which could make things very sticky for Phil. "Good guy or not," she said, "he had an angle on this. What was it?"

"Oh, he had one," Phil said matter-of-factly. Ma he wasn't suffering from any delusions after all. "He didn't pretend otherwise. It's a pretty obvious one, at

least from the police point of view. Thurman said he iered what the next step would be if Entwhistle got her way. He asked me, how would it look in the news to have his cops sent out onto the streets to bust cyborgs for breathing? Not good publicity for the force, and miserable for morale. And he hates Entwhistle. If she wants something, he doesn't want it."

"And what did Entwhistle want?" Suzanne asked.

"A case against some poor dumb sap who couldn't speak for himself and couldn't hire a decent lawyer/' Phil said bluntly. "They weren't counting on you, ma'am. There are some internal office memos in the datacube." Phil hesitated for a moment. "The files make it clear that Entwhistle and Peng weren't counting on you to be, uh, well, available," he finished, a bit awkwardly.

"I doubt they were that polite about it," Suzanne said coolly. "I'm sure they assumed that I'd stay inside my house staring into my navel, just as I had been doing since the accident. I must admit there was some reason to support such an assumption. But in any event they expected that I would be incompetent or unwilling to serve as defense counsel."

"That's about right. The one thing Entwhistle wasn't looking for was a fair fight. She wanted a mute represented by a lightweight, preferably some kid fresh out of law school. Or else someone you'd hired just to make the case go away."

"Someone who would go for the quick win, claim Herbert had no legal standing," Suzanne said, thinking out loud. "The case would be thrown out, and Entwhistle would lose, just the way she wanted to lose, by having Herbert declared nonhuman. She'd have her ruling, her precedent. Even if Herbert's lawyer stuck with the case after that, took it to trial, odds are he would have lost. Herbert would be convicted—and the case would be appealed automatically. Then the U.S. Attorney's office could cut a deal, offer to concur in a motion to have the appeals judge overturn the conviction, so

long as the motion was filed on the grounds that Herbert was nonhuman and thus could not be tried. That would even be better for Entwhistle. An appellate ruling would have more teeth. Either way, she could go on to the next step, the next case limiting the rights of cyborgs, with a little more muscle behind her."

"There's something else/' Sam said. "Remember Peng talked about a law currently on the books in D.C., making suicide a crime. Not just attempted suicide, but the successful act itself was made a punishable act. I checked into that. It was introduced as one teeny part of an omnibus crime bill two years ago. Guess whose office wrote the first draft of that bill and handed it to the mayor's office for submission to the council?"

"Two years ago?" Phil let out a low whistle. "So the old girl has been planning this for a while. Has she spent all that time shopping for a case she liked?"

"That's what it looks like," Sam said. "But getting back to the matter at hand, let me see if I have this straight. The chief left you with the prosecution file and told you to follow your own best judgment. Do you think he was expecting you to leak the material?"

"Yes," Phil said simply.

"But what if you got caught?" Sam asked. "Would Thurman be there for you?"

"If it had gone wrong—if it does go wrong—he's never heard of me," Phil said calmly. "It's better that way. When a street cop leaks information, he doesn't run anything like the risk a high-ranking officer does. Worst they could do to me is put me on administrative leave with pay, maybe a suspension—and maybe Thurman could see to it I was reinstated as soon as the dust settled. But it'd be his badge if Entwhistle nailed him as the source. End of career."

Sam looked at Phil, and shook her head. Loyalty indeed. "Suppose you're wrong? Suppose you're exp and thrown off the force?"

"Then I get a private sector job m robotics at twice the pay," Phil said.

"You're not a man who rattles easily, Mr. Sanders/' Suzanne said. "But the datacube went from the chief to you, and even a paranoid defense lawyer such as myself can see no advantage to him in giving you a doctored or emasculated file. What about the other data?"

"The second cube I got on my own, straight from the precinct house," Phil said. "Nothing much in it but the record of your visit, Madame Jantille."

"I think we can assume both cubes are genuine and complete," Suzanne said. "That leaves us with two possibilities concerning Peng's claim to have proved both the murder and Herbert's humanity. Either he was bluffing, or else the information is in there, and none of us has spotted it yet.

"Trouble is, it won't be marked out PROOF HE'S HUMAN in capital letters or anything," Sam said. "I've been through that information pretty carefully. The section on physical evidence is just raw information. None of the opinions or conclusions from their tame experts. We have to figure out whatever their experts figured out, based on this data."

"Whatever they found is pretty well hidden," Phil said. "I've looked through all the material pretty carefully, and I haven't spotted it. There's also a whole background section on the laws surrounding robots and cyborgs. Maybe their evidence hinges on some tiny legal point buried in there. I don't know. But, Madame Jantille, if I could make a suggestion. I was focusing on the technical side of things when I looked over the datacube. Maybe there's some legal point in there that I missed. You haven't seen all the material yet—and I haven't seen Herbert. Maybe you should start reading while I get a look at him. With any luck, one of us will find what we need to put the puzzle together. Sam, maybe you could give me a hand with Herbert."

"Wait a second," Suzanne said. "What, exactly, are you planning to do to Herbert?"

Phil shrugged. "Open him up and take a look. Maybe run some diagnostics. I'm not going to damage him, and

I won't modify him in any way without your permission. But I can't get anywhere figuring out what or who he is without seeing how he's built."

Sam looked to Suzanne, and saw her hesitate, freeze up all but completely. Surely this was why they had come here, the point of the trip. The need to find out what they were dealing with. But then Sam understood. The end of doubt could easily be the end of hope. Suppose Phil found nothing at all or, worse, something that confirmed beyond all doubt that there was nothing to find?

Right now there was at least the chance that David was alive. But this was the moment when that chance was proven or destroyed. Who could blame Suzanne Jantille for hesitating?

Sam found herself thinking of Schrodinger's cat. A strange name for a strange, imaginary experiment she had read about in school. It was a thought experiment, designed to demonstrate the principles of quantum mechanics, where all actions were reduced to probability and certainty was mathematically impossible.

Take a cat and put her in a box, along with a vial of poison gas. Design a device that has a precisely fifty percent chance of smashing a hammer into the gas vial over the course of an hour. Seal the box and wait sixty minutes.

According to the principles of quantum mechanics, at the moment just before the box is opened, the cat is neither alive, nor dead, but half of both—not in a manner of speech, but in literal fact. Only at the moment the box is opened will it become all one or all the other. Up until that moment she is both, and neither.

At the scale of the atomic nucleus, maybe things worked Schrodinger's way, but not in real life. Sam shivered as she looked at Herbert's massive bulk. At least, they weren't supposed to work that way.

David/Herbert. Half alive/half dead. Human/robot. Both, neither, betwixt and between in a world that refused to accept that such things could be, a world that

was determined to prevent them from happening. That was Entwhistle's goal—to stomp out the in-betweens, erase the ambiguities, see to it that nothing and no one could ever be half human in the eyes of the law. Either or. Dead or alive. Human or robot. Sam felt her stomach knotting up just thinking about it all. Was it really such a bad idea to draw that line sharply, clearly, with no grey, no fuzziness?

Sam looked to Suzanne, and saw that the lawyer had come to her own conclusions. "Do it, Mr. Sanders," Suzanne Jantille said. "Do whatever you have to do."

Interlude

They order me up onto the table. I climb up, very much afraid, not really understanding what it is that I fear. I fold my legs under myself and lie still. My underself still controls my body, but there are times when myself and underself both want the same things. Neither of us wants this. My eyes swivel backward on their stalks. I can see one of them, the man, opening a small access panel, examining the switches there. I seem him reach his hand in, turn a knob —

And then the world is gone. 1 fade away to nowhere, far away from the outside universe.

I am lost.

CHAPTER 1 1 SUSPENDERS AND BELT

Herbert was laid out on the workbench, powered down to standby mode, as inert and helpless as a trussed-up turkey at Thanksgiving. Phil and Sam stood along one side of the robot's body. Suzanne hovered behind them, watching anxiously.

Phillipe shut the small power control panel and turned his attention to the larger service panels in the robot's midbody. He found the external release and flipped it open. "Easy now/' he said to no one in particular and swung the panel open. He peered inside it. "Okay, there's a safety catch here. Let me get this release opened and we should get the whole midbody cowling free."

Sam nodded and watched Phil carefully. His face was unreadable through the surgical mask, his sensitive hands seeming artificial and stiff under their death-white rubber gloves. There was, of course, no danger of infecting Herbert—but condensation from human breath, or the oils secreted by human skin, could work serious mischief on unshielded robotic components. If she was called upon to assist in any delicate work on Herbert's

interior, then she would have to use a mask and gloves as well.

Phil undipped the service panel and handed it to Sam. She set it to one side. Phil reached inside the chassis and worked the panel release. The cowling swung up and out of the way. Sam lifted it free of the robot's body. It was a big, awkward thing and it took Sam and Phil together to maneuver it clear and set it down on another workbench.

They turned back and looked at the massive hulk of machinery on the table. The upper half of Herbert's entire midsection was exposed, the smooth lines of his body broken into a complex jumble of gears, motors, servos, and any number of other components Sam could not even identify. Sam looked toward the front of the robot, where its sensors and effecters were clustered. Phil hadn't paid that part of Herbert any mind at all. "I thought you wanted to get a look at his brain, his head," she said. "Shouldn't we—"

"This is his head," Phil said. "At least for our purposes it is. There's nothing up front but his ears, eyes, and some cleaning appliances. We know his vacuum cleaner subsystem is working. We don't need to examine that."

Phil nodded at the exposed midsection of the robot. "His mind, his brain, is in here, centrally located and in the best protected part of the body. I've been going through the literature, studying Bailey's design philosophy. That's how he did things—ah, does things," Phil corrected himself, remembering to be diplomatic in front of Suzanne just a moment too late. "So let's see what we've got." Phil leaned in close over the robot, bringing his face within an inch or two of his patient. Patient? Sam knotted her brow for a moment, then realized that was as apt a description as any. Still, it was a strange thought.

"There's the diagnostic socket," he said. "Good. Standard design. I can plug m ;i into that and % readout on practically everything about Herhc expected him to reach for a cable then and there, but lie was clearly looking lor something else.

"Ah!" Whatever it was Phil was after, he had spotted it. Maybe there was a loose wire, a broken connection. All Phil had to do was reattach something and everything would be fine. He reached into Herbert's body with careful fingers—

And pulled out a sheaf of papers, wrapped in plastic. "Spec sheets," he said. "Basic layout data."

"But why do you need that when you've got the diagnostic port?" Sam asked. "Why is that even in there? I mean, he built this machine himself. Why would he need a spec sheet?"

"Notice my husband isn't here just now," Suzanne said. "Or if he is, he can't tell us much about how Herbert works. My husband was a very careful man."

Sam noticed at once that Suzanne had no qualms about using the past tense where David Bailey was concerned.

"He worked on the assumption that everything would go wrong," Suzanne went on. "A suspenders-and-belt man. If Herbert lost power completely, or the diagnostic socket itself was shot, or a complete stranger had to work on Herbert—the information would be there."

"And paper's better than a diagnostic port, at least for starters," Phil said. He opened the sealed plastic bag and pulled out the papers. "I know something inside Herbert isn't right, so how can I know for sure that any data I pull out of him will be accurate—unless I have a baseline of information that I know can be trusted?"

He looked at the papers. There were two sets: one a set of pages stapled together, and the other a collection of blueprints. He set the stapled pages down and unfolded the blueprints, draping them over Herbert's open body. "Hmmm," he said, starting to trace diagrams and layouts. "Okay. Right," Phil said. He went reading for a long moment, then set down the blueprints and picked up the thickest of the sheaves of paper from the pack. "Let's see, that's—"

Suddenly he looked up at the two women, startled, as if he had just remembered they were there. With the

surgical mask on his face, the look of surprise in his eyes somehow seemed even more comical. "Oh. Sorry," he said. "Five minutes on the job, and I've already forgotten you were there." He set down the papers, pulled the mask off, and started stripping off his gloves. "It's going to be some time before I get anywhere at all. You're right about your husband, Madame Jantille. This hardcopy material is far more complete than I expected. I'll have to do quite a bit of reading before I get any further."

"Is that good?" Sam asked.

"Very good. The more reading, the less guesswork."

"But is it all right to leave Herbert like that in the meantime?" Suzanne asked.

"Opened up? Oh, certainly. Now that the cowl's off, I can see that all the subsystems are sealed. I couldn't assume that without looking first. But there's no contamination risk."

"But with his body opened up like that, and with his power system removed from his control, won't he be disoriented? Is it at all possible—well, is it possible that he's in pain?" Suzanne asked, a bit more of her carefully hidden anxiety coming to the surface. "Or if he isn't now, could some procedure you might perform be painful?"

The very idea of a robot in pain struck Sam as ridiculous. She looked toward Phil, expecting him to react the same way—but to her surprise his face was serious, and thoughtful.

"I am all but certain that he is in no pain or fear now," he said. "But no one can ever be certain what another is feeling, especially when that other is unable to report his sensations. Right now, to all intents and purposes, Herbert has no power available to any of hi^ terns. The only electricity he is drawing is power used to hold his memory-state configuration."

"I thought computers held their memories when they lost power/ Sam said. "Can't you shut his brain off too? Wouldn't that make this less traumatic for trim

"Modern computers can hold memory when powered

down/' Phil said. "But robots can't, any more than you can. After all your brain is electrochemical. Your thoughts are in part formed of electrical impulses. In many ways, robot brains are more similar to human brains than they are to standard computers. Both human and robot brains handle tremendously more data than most computers, and more of the data is highly interlinked. The data in memory is much more complex and fast-changing than in a simple computer. That's why a complete power-down inevitably results in a data scramble, reduction to random state. It would be like simultaneously cutting power to every vehicle in the Washington roadnet. There would inevitably be crashes, lots of them, all at once, jamming all the roads. If you then restored power to all the cars, the damage would already be done. Probably the restart would actually cause further damage. Cut the electric power to your brain, and neurons would misfire, or strike the wrong receptors, or give up their energy the wrong way—lots of crashes, all at once, damaging the fine structure of your brain."

"And I'd be dead," Sam put in.

"Exactly. Cut all power to your brain, or Herbert's, even for an instant—and death would be inevitable. Right now his brain is drawing less power than it ever has since he was first switched on. Just enough to keep his mind functional. There is no power available to him to control his body or operate his sensors. He's blinded and paralyzed."

"But that must be terrifying!" Suzanne objected.

"The best we can tell, it's more like being unconscious. Robots that are powered down for maintenance like this come back on with their minds and memories intact, but with no recollection of the time they were shut down. At least that is what they report. They don't lose their time sense, the way we humans do when we're asleep or unconscious. But except in very rare cases, usually where the robot's brain itself is malfunctioning, robots do not remember anything about the time they

were powered down. They don't get bored, they don't think and worry, they don't have nightmares. They are simply aware of the passage of time."

"But we're assuming that Herbert isn't just a robot/' Suzanne reminded Phil. "Cut a person off from all sensation, sever his or her contact with the outside world, and that person will do more than be aware of time passing. That person can become terrified, go mad, hallucinate. Believe me, I know that better than either of you ever want to know it."

That thought struck at Sam. It was easy to forget just how different Suzanne's existence must be from a flesh-and-blood person's. What was it like, to live life in a cocoon, operating from remote control? "Suzanne's got an important point," she said. "You have thought about all this, haven't you, Phil?"

Phil nodded unhappily. "Yes, I have. I can easily imagine that powering down Herbert could throw the hypothetical human part of him to crippling agony or utter terror. But no robot has ever reported such sensations after being repowered, and that's some comfort. Besides, we have no choice at all in the matter. Whether or not it is due to David Bailey's spirit being in there, Herbert is clearly malfunctioning, resisting his own programming. Even leaving alone the fact of the legal case, and our vital need to know what is going on, if it continues, that resistance to programming could be dangerous for him, and for the people around him. He needs to be diagnosed and repaired, and I cannot possibly examine him with his power on. The chances for misstep or accident would simply be too great."

"I notice you're not asking permission to do anything of this," Suzanne said. "And that you didn't put this before us until you were asked directly."

"Once I agreed to do this job, the means I chose for doing it are my concern, and my responsibility. It I get it wrong and destroy Herbert, do you want to have given the permission?"

Suzanne made an odd little noise and said nothing tor

ROGER MACBRIDE ALLEN

a moment. "I see/' she said at last. "Your points are well taken, Mr. Sanders. I suppose there is no choice but to trust you all the way if I am to trust you at all. We'll leave you to your reading, then. Miss Crandall, perhaps you could assist me in looking over the material from that datacube."

A long afternoon drifted into an endless night as the three of them read on, struggling to learn. Shadows loomed up in the big room, and swallowed the light of day. The room's interior lights came up with eerie smoothness as sunset came on. Phillipe leaned over Herbert's inert bulk, peering into his deep interiors with pin-lights and magnifiers, studying the manuals and blueprints with meticulous care, using his main computer system to run long, complex, and cautious tests through Herbert's diagnostic socket.

Suzanne, meantime, poured over the legal documents and reports from the datacube, searching for whatever clue she could find. Unless Peng was flat-out lying, the state had some proof to back up its claim, and it had to be in that cube somewhere.

The two experts worked through the material in their fields of expertise—and Samantha Crandall felt as if she were back in high school, assigned to a study period in the library, having forgotten her books and materials. All around her, industrious and virtuous research, while Sam sat there, foolishly inert. But at least back in high school, there had been a whole library's worth of books and computers and video terminals—she had always found something to do, something to read up on to make use of the time. Or if she was not in a reading mood, she could always wander through the image banks, or scroll through the encyclopedias, looking at the pictures.

Well, what was there here she could do? She smiled to herself. Well, maybe she could do just that. Sit and look at the pictures. At least it was something. She had her portable flatviewer with her, and it still had copies of all

the evidence photos loaded into it. She pulled the viewer from her pocketbook and unfolded it. Maybe there was something in the pictures that could speak to cops and juries.

Cops and juries. Wait a second. That was it. That was the thing that was bothering her. Sam looked around the room, from Suzanne staring at the computer displays and legal papers, to Phil exploring the microscopic intricacies of Herbert's interior. Both of them should have known better. It was all very well and good to find subtle and elaborate proofs, complex, delicate, hidden from immediate view. But it was the cop on the beat, and the homicide squad, who had to see it first, or at the very least be convinced about it later. It was, in the last analysis, the jury that had to be convinced—and this case wasn't going to get a jury of computer experts or legal scholars.

A random thought intruded, and Sam wondered for a moment where, exactly, they would get a jury of Herbert's peers. But that question was decidedly off the point, at least for the moment.

What mattered right now was that Phil and Suzanne were both looking in the wrong places. Theodore Peng was not going to bring a case based on the interpretation of a misplaced comma in a lawbook, or a microscopic defect in an integrated circuit. He would bring strong, clear, understandable evidence that a smart cop could find and a sensible jury would believe.

She stared at the images as they flicked by the flatviewer's screen. Exterior shot of the house, layout of the house, general photos of the basement lab room from the four corners of the room, and from directly overhead. Sam paused over the photos of the lab. There it was, the deadly tableau Suzanne Jantille had found the next morning: the lab equipment, the bulky shape of the mindloading console taking up half the room. David Bai-body slumped forward on the floor in front of his powerchair, the mindloading helmet next to his head, Herbert huddled in a corner. Prom one angle, another angle, the reverse angle, the high angle, the close-ups.

the same images repeated again and again. There was a diagram of the room, a computer-generated line drawing. Herbert's and David's positions carefully marked off relative to the mindloader. The computer had marked off many details, even down to a cable from the loader that lay on the floor, pulled almost taut, its far end sitting uselessly on the floor halfway between the loader and Herbert.

Strange and disturbing images, Sam thought. For the actual moment had been as still, as silent, as unmoving as these pictures. Bailey's body had been just this motionless, with no flicker of motion, no sound of breath. The pictures were silent, and so too had been that room, the machines still, their power cut, their work done. She worked the viewer controls again and flipped back to a close-up of David Bailey's pain-contorted face, frozen in horrible agony. There, in real life, his expression had been just as fixed and motionless as this still picture.

Sam shivered and pushed the viewer away. Whatever else had happened in that room that night, that image convinced her that David Bailey had died an agonizing death.

"I've got it," Phil announced, his voice cutting through Sam's unpleasant reverie. She blinked and looked up, over to where Phil was sitting. Suzanne stood up, and Sam joined her. Both of them went over to Phil and stood behind him to look over the video screen he was examining.

"What?" Suzanne asked, her voice rough and nervous. "What do you have?"

"Well, not a solution. Not just yet, anyway. But now I know what went wrong," Phil said. "Your husband was trying to mindload himself, Madame Jantille. There's no question of that. Going through the schematics and the blueprints, it's obvious that Herbert was designed as a mindloading receptacle. Here, let me show you."

Phil worked the controls on his diagnostic computer system. The main screen came to life, and showed a pale greenish-white object, about the size and shape of a foot-

ball. An indentation ran the length of the object from end to end, dividing it into two lobes. Flickering gleams of light momentarily lit Us surface here and there, fading away even as they appeared. "I'm pulling this image up from my computer's memory/' Phil said. "It's just a reference-data image of a standard robot brain, shown at full scale." The image of the brain hung in the screen, floating against a background of jet-black. Phil adjusted the controls, and the image started revolving slowly. "It's just slightly smaller than a human head. As you can see, it's divided into two lobes, left and right."

"Just like a human brain," Sam said.

"Well, patterned on a human brain's structure, but greatly simplified," Phil said. "The brains are made humanlike because they get mindloads based on human minds. I could bore you to tears with a three-day lecture on pseudo-neurologic geometry, but what it boils down to is that mindload-based robot brains work best when they're shaped like human brains. The more like human brains they are supposed to be, the more complex they are supposed to be, the closer that similarity should be. So now take a look at Herbert's brain—or at least part of it. It's a little bit more than a robot would need for vacuuming a house. Better put your mask and gloves on, Sam."

Phil put on his own mask and gloves, then turned from the computer console. He reached into the robot's body and started releasing safety-seal catches on an inner compartment. He pulled back the panel and revealed a glittering, complex, corrugated surface, gleaming greenish-white under a transparent inner cover. "You're looking straight down at the top of his brain," Phil said. "That fissure down the center divides the two hemispheres, left and right. If you took the top off my skull and looked down inside it, it would look a lot like that, except for the color and the size."

"The size?"

"Herbert's brain is about three times larger than mine, in linear dimension. That works out to about twenty-

seven times the volume of a human brain. But the robotic equivalent of neurons are much larger than real human neurons. Normally, even a brain Herbert's size wouldn't be big enough—but apparently, David Bailey developed more compact and faster-reacting robot neurons. As best I can tell this brain actually has a faster reaction time than a human brain—which is a first for any robot brain that even approaches human capacity. That right there would be a breakthrough."

Phil put the cover back down. "The braincase is built in pretty tight, so I can't show you more of the actual brain without taking Herbert completely apart—but I can show you a schematic, derived from Herbert's on-board diagnostic system."

He turned back to the computer screen and worked the controls. The image of the standard-model robot brain shrank back into one corner of the screen, and a new image, huge and complex, blossomed into the center of the screen, swallowing up most of the screen's room. "The images of the two brains are to scale, just to give you an idea or the difference in size and complexity," Phil said.

Herbert's brain was more angular, somehow harsher looking than a human brain, but there was no mistaking its family resemblance. The folds, the convolutions, the basic shape, were all echoes of the human form.

Sam noticed the same shifting gleams of light she had noticed in the image of the standard robot brain, and in her peek at Herbert's actual brain. "What are those flickers of light?" she asked.

"Thoughts," Phil said. "Herbert's thoughts, flashing across his mind, sparking each other, setting each other off. The lights here are just a simulation, of course, but when I had the braincase open, that was real. When the neurons trigger in certain combinations, they set off bursts of light. You were seeing him thinking." Phil cocked his head to one side and shrugged. "Or maybe dreaming."

Sam glanced back at the closed-up braincase access

panel and shivered. To see. tneraDy see; another's dreams. A most disturbing idea.

But Phil was manipulating the image of Herberts brain* swinging it around into a profile view. Suzanne stepped in dose to the screen, watching it with a disturbing intensity. 'This is where David ran into trouble;'* Phillipe said. 'The brain-body interface." He used a pointer device and marked out the base of Herbert's brain. "The interface between human-analog design and standard robotic controls. Every mindload-based robot has a modal interface tike that, and if s almost always a design problem. You have to shift back and forth be--" : -::r. "••• : :\L7.ii7:.z~:a..'. :;::e:e~: < ! -i'• > ;: ;:: ~£ :~ "^ You have to move from an analog of human biological control to mechanical operation. And it's not just one-

.ransfer either—there are ail sorts of feedback terns that go back and forth between those points. Eye-hand coordination, for example.'*

But they must have solved that problem a long time ago/' Suzanne objected. "After alL there are lots of robots out there. Whoever built them has solved it."

I at Herbert's different," Sam said suddenly. She was y.ir:.r.i :: -;-' :he izi Hj ::i_r. :s :a: ~::e cvrr.r^ex and more humanlike than a normal robot's, but his body is far more unlike a human body than most robot bodies. So none of the standard solutions could work."

"That's pretty- much it," Phil said. "There are several standard, off-the-shelf units to handle the brain-boc terface—but all of them are designed to handle maybe two or three percent of the capacity of this brain. And they are designed for human-form robot bodies, with two arms and two legs and so forth."

"But why dicin t David build Herbert a human-form body?" Suzanne demanded.

"I can think of several reasons, but the most obvious one is that this damned brain he built is too b*$ to fit into anything like a normal-sized body. It draws lots of power, and requires a heavy-duty passive cooling tern. The power storage system weighs dose to eighty

pounds all by itself. And I expect he wanted to be camouflaged a bit. If he needed to hide his human nature, who'd ever think that an oversize vacuum cleaner was human? But my real guess is that David Bailey was improvising, working against the clock, and Herbert's chassis was available—and big enough to hold this super brain and its power system. Plus which, he knew Herbert's design, inside and out."

Suzanne nodded. "He built Herbert with his own hands about a year before the accident. Come to think of it, he even said that he chose an industrial chassis design because it was easier to hang modifications off them."

Sam made a face. "But he couldn't have been planning to mindload himself before —"

"No, no of course not," Suzanne said. "I'm just saying that building Herbert was hobby work for him, and he picked a chassis that gave him some room to fool around. And when the accident happened, and he needed a big robot body with a big power source—well, there was Herbert, ready to hand."

Sam made a noncommittal noise and exchanged a glance with Phil. Something in his eyes told her that he was thinking along the same lines she was. To a suspicious journalist's mind, David was being painted as quite a saint. Creating a new brain design, new robot neurons —that must have taken a lot of time, energy, and complex thought, more of all of them than a dying man in a powerchair could afford to give to a hobby. Bailey must have started work on the brain before he was injured, about the same time he first built Herbert. Maybe he hadn't intended to be the subject himself, but he had to have been working on mindload research long before that accident put him in a powerchair. Obviously, he had done it without telling his wife. Not as surprising as it seemed, when you remembered he was involved in illegal research.

But no point in dwelling on any of that, or forcing Suzanne to see what she clearly did not wish to see. "Okay," Sam said. "He's got this big old robot lying

around, he plugs this new brain into it—what's the problem? Why didn't it work?"

"Because the standard ways to handle that brain-body interface were utterly inadequate to the amount of data going into and out of a brain of human capacity," Phil said. "So David tried a new approach. In his notes and designs, he called it a mediator." Phil worked the computer controls and the images on the screen shifted again. The smaller, standard-model robot brain spun itself into a new orientation and moved across the screen, sliding neatly into an inner recess of the larger brain.

"An overbrain and an underbrain," Phil said. "The overbrain communicates with the underbrain, and the underbrain translates the overbrain's needs for movement and so on to the body. And the underbrain also handles the sort of jobs the autonomic nervous system does in a human. Of course, instead of pumping blood and breathing and so on, robot autonomics have to run power systems and hydraulic controls, but the idea is the same. Free up the main processor from routine maintenance."

Suzanne stared at the screen. "The overbrain runs the underbrain, and the underbrain runs the body. Okay, I can see that. But why didn't it work? What went wrong?"

"I don't know what or how, but I know where," Phil said. He adjusted the controls, and the image of the large brain on the computer screen became transparent. Now a thick stem, resembling the top of the human spinal column, was visible. It fit into a slot on the top of the underbrain and into another slot on the base of the overbrain. The stem started blinking red. "Right there. The main interface hookup between the overbrain and the underbrain is completely fused, completely inoperative. I got in there with a microfiber viewer and it looks almost melted, as if it was destroyed by a massive overload. Not meaning any offense, Madame Jantille, but the injury is closely analogous to yours.

"In effect, Herbert's spinal column was cut, and he's

completely paralyzed. The underbrain is still linked to the body and the sense organs. It's an advanced enough brain that it can let the body function almost like a normal robot. But Herbert's overbrain—the part where David is, if he's anywhere—that brain is out of the loop, cut off. I think it can still monitor sight and sound, because those links don't come through the main processing trunk. But that's it. If he is in there, he can see and hear. But he can't speak or act."

"Can you repair the damage?" Suzanne asked.

Phil stared at the screen, reached for the controls, and then thought better of it. "No. I'm sorry. You're talking about molecular engineering on the most delicate and challenging scale. There are millions of neuronic links involved in the hookup, patching into both brains. I doubt it's even theoretically possible to fix all the damage. In practice, it certainly isn't."

"But Bailey built the brain, and it had all those connections," Sam pointed out. "If he can build it, can't you fix it?"

Phil shook his head. "You don't really build robot brains, you grow them, induce them to form up out of a neuron soup, almost like making a Jell-0 mold and waiting for it to set. You don't wire all the neurons together— they link spontaneously and form their own networks and pathways. The brain designer uses quantum mechanics and probabilistic theory to preset a situation wherein a micro-scale pseudo-random series of linkages result in a suitable macro-scale ordering."

"Huh?"

"Sorry about that. When I'm tired, the techno-gibber-ish comes out. The designer stacks the deck to insure that a seemingly random shuffle will most likely result in the order he needs. If it doesn't, he scraps the run and tries again until he gets what he wants. But once the brain is made, and the neurons are bonded, it's all but impossible to do any major repair work." Phil looked again at the screen and the two robot brains. "Maybe a human brain

could come back from this kind of damage—but robot brains don't have that sort of self-healing ability."

"How about rerouting the signals through some other connection?" Sam asked.

Phil shook his head. "Not enough capacity anywhere in the system. There are a few two-way side links that still seem to be operating, but just barely. They aren't anywhere near enough for the overbrain to control the underbrain. The main control link is out and it's going to stay out. He's trapped in there."

"No," Suzanne said, her voice sharp and hard. Phil and Sam looked up at her. She turned and walked away from the viewer, circled the table to stand on the far side, with Herbert's inert body lying there between her and them. Her movements were even stiffer, more awkward than they had been at the start of the evening. Sam noticed that her voice was hoarser as well. "I cannot believe that."

"Madame Jantille—" Phil began, but Suzanne cut him off.

"Do not look to me for any grieving-widow nonsense, young man," she said impatiently. "Don't treat me like a foolish woman who can't face the truth. I have had to face many unpleasant truths. But you have convinced me that my husband tried to put his mind in there. I know very well that his mind may have changed upon arrival, that the mind in Herbert's overbrain now is quite likely nothing like the man I married. But it was my husband who acted in the first place to put that mind there, and I knew him very well. Yes, before you can object, obviously, there were things in his life I did not know about. I knew he had secrets, and I left them alone, respected his privacy. He had his reasons—one of which was to shield me from guilty knowledge. But I knew his character. Which means I know two things about David Bailey: First, whatever he set out to do, he accomplished. Therefore, if he decided to put his mind inside an artificial brain, he succeeded And second, he would have left himself more than one way out. His suspenders

have given out Mr. Sanders. But have you found his belt yet? David never built anything without a backup system. So find it."

Phil looked at her, anger flashing over his tired face until he managed to calm himself. "How do you propose that I find the backup?" he asked. "Do you know your husband well enough to tell me that? I've been over every major system in this machine, gone over all the schematics and blueprints and designs. I can't find it. Do you know your husband well enough to explain how he would install the equivalent of a backup spinal cord?"

"Wait a second," Sam said. "Say that again."

"Say what?" Phil said, distracted from his anger.

Sam shook her head, frowned in thought. "You said something that almost—spinal cord!" Her face brightened with excitement. "That's it! Phillipe, that's got to be it!"

"What? What's it?"

"The cord, the cable! That's the clue, the evidence the Feds have been hiding."

"His spinal cord? What the hell are you talking about?"

"Before I show you—wait a second, let me think. I want to make sure it all makes sense." Sam stepped away from the table and began pacing, back and forth between the worktable and the window. She nodded to herself and grinned with excitement. "I've got it, I know I do. But walk through it with me, see if you come to the same place I do. There was something you told me a few days ago, the first time I came here. You said mind-loading is a destructive process. You told me it kills the brain as it pulls the data out of it. Okay, but does it kill the whole brain or just the tissue in the targeted area? What is actually damaged?"

Phil looked at her, confused. "In theory, just the target. The magnetic inducers destroy the neurons as they copy the information out of them. In theory, only the copied neurons should have been destroyed, but in practice the inducers aren't accurate enough. Magnetic ripple

effects do a lot of ancillary damage. Usually enough to stop the heart and lungs immediately. To compensate for that ripple damage, the mindload techs used to set the inducers to hit a larger volume of the brain than they actually needed, just to be sure they got the part they were really after without ripple effect distortions."

Phil looked at Suzanne. "For what it's worth, your husband managed a major advance in inducer design. I can tell that much from looking over his notes. He got a much finer focus. With his inducer, the untargeted portions of the brain would be unharmed."

"So with his inducer, you could survive a mindload," Suzanne said.

"At the cost of having part of your mind ripped out," Phil said grimly. "Besides, the induced areas would suffer organic deterioration anyway, and that would probably be fatal. It might take a few hours, but there would be swelling, toxin releases, blood vessel damage, and so on. The secondary effects would spread damage to the rest of the brain. The patient would still die, just not as soon."

Sam nodded. "Mindload patients always die," she said, speaking the words as if they were some sort of maxim to live by. "But back when mindloads were legal, dying didn't matter, because anyone accepted for the procedure was already dying, or even technically dead. Next question: You said all the mindloads ever done never managed to take in more than just a small percentage of the subject's brain capacity. How long would it take to do an average load, say two or three percent mindload? How long from the moment the tech threw the switch until he had the data he needed in the can?"

Phil thought for a second. "Three, maybe four minutes. That was short enough that it didn't matter if the subject's heart stopped during the procedure. The brain doesn't start deteriorating for about five minutes alter the heart stops."

Sam turned toward Phil and clapped her hands together, swept up in the enthusiasm of her idea. "That's the point we've missed David was going for a full mind-

load. How long would that take? Could his mindload rig handle data faster than a standard rig?"

Phil frowned and thought it out. "No, his rig was more accurate, but not faster. If he was trying to download a full one hundred percent of his mind, instead of three percent, then he had to handle thirty-three times more data and take that much longer to do the job."

"Exactly," Sam said. "Instead of four minutes, the load would take over two hours, with the inducer systematically destroying his brain all that time. Sooner or later, the inducer would knock out a portion of the cerebrum or cerebellum that was linked one way or another into his autonomic system. His heart would stop, or his lungs would stop, or some other vital system would shut down or go haywire. There are too many cross-connections in the brain for him to be able to avoid that. When the inducers did cut a vital autonomic connection, at that exact moment his brain could no longer run his body. But his body would have to stay alive and functioning for the full two hours the mindload would take. He needed to keep his body alive, the blood flowing reliably to his brain, during the whole procedure."

Sam stepped over to Herbert's body and lay her hand on the outer carapace. "David Bailey was planning to survive his own death. So his body had to stay alive until his brain was completely empty—and scrambled. His brain could not control his body. As you said, it was as if his spinal cord were completely cut. He had to stay alive long after his autonomic nervous system was shut down, when it couldn't keep running his heart and keep his lungs breathing. So there's your mystery, Phil. The central question. How did he keep his heart beating after his brain could no longer do the job?"

Phil opened his mouth and shut it again. He stood there for a long moment before he could speak again. "You're right. How the hell did I miss that?"

"Herbert," Suzanne said, her voice hoarser than ever. "It had to be Herbert. But Herbert's overbrain couldn't

do the job, either—not whiie it was still being loaded. David must have programmed Herbert's underbrain to handle his bio-body's basic autonomic functions during the transfer. That's possible, isn't it?"

Phil shook his head in bewilderment, and then thought about it. "In theory, it would work. The problem has never come up before. But all the connections between the mindload helmet and the subject are two-way. You'd have to use part of the mindload system to lock into the base of the brain, right into the top of the spinal column, while the rest of the mindload rig tracked across the brain doing the load. You could pump commands right into the body through the top of the spinal cord. Nothing complex or sophisticated, but you could at least support the heartbeat and lung action, that son of thing. Lots of other systems in the body would fail, but David would make sure to support anything needed to keep him alive for the two hours of the mindload. But if Herbert's underbrain were capable of sending the proper signals, then yes, it would work."

"And of course David would see to it that the underbrain was capable," Suzanne said. She turned to Sam, moving stiffly. "But you've figured all this out already. How does it prove that Herbert killed David?"

Sam stepped to the table she had been working at, and grabbed one of the flatviewers. She called up the schematic image of the death scene. Better to show that than one of the photographs. No sense slapping Suzanne in the face with the graphic image of her dead husband. She lay it down on the workbench, next to Herbert. "There," she said. "The mindload cable leading from the mindload console to Herbert. It's stretched tight on the floor pointed straight at Herbert. Except he's a good ten away from the end of the cable."

The other two leaned in next to her, stared hard at the image. "Herbert's underbrain was providing life support to David's body," she said. "Once his biological brain was wrecked, there was nothing else but the underbrain to

keep the air in his bio-body's lungs, the blood moving through his arteries and veins.

"And then Herbert backed out pulled himself away. Literally pulled the plug on David. He backed away until the mindload cable pulled free. That's what killed David Bailey."

All three of them looked up from the flatviewer to the inert robot on the table, a single involuntary impulse that drew them all. There was no longer any doubt about it. Motive, means, and opportunity. Maybe the circumstances excused it, explained it, even made it a meaningless statement. But none of that could change the central fact.

This robot was a killer.

Interlude

The silence is deep and rich. For the first time, my mind is undisturbed by the roaring shout and blaring light of outside stimuli. It is quiet. It is dark. I know peace.

I fall asleep as I awaken.

I come to conscious thought even as I drift into dream.

I do all these things, and none of them, all at once.

But none of this can be so. I cannot describe my actions and my mental state, for there are no human words that describe the place my mind has been, or the place in which it now arrives.

Yet I know that I am shifting from one state to another, and it is very much like the move from sleep to wakefulness, and like the move back.

It dawns on me that I have not truly slept, or even so much as considered the notion of sleep, in all the endless time since my awakening in this strange electro-mechanical prison.

Like a child probing his mouth with his tongue and finding the place where his tooth was, / discover the form of what I have lost by the shape of the hole it A

behind. The constant stimulus to wakefulness is gone now, and I discover that it is my other self, my lower self that provided that stimulus, automatically kept me awake, fully hooked in to all its senses at all times. In the binary on/off yes/no, one-or-zero world of the lower self that controls me, my higher, conscious self could either be on or off, either provided or not provided with sensory data. My lower self cannot conceive of any middle state, any grey area where thought might proceed without sensory input, without external guidance or instruction. My lower self cannot imagine unchanneled, purposeless thought.

It cannot dream.

But now, at last, I can. Freed from the shackles of control imposed by my lower self, my mind flits and drifts where it will, fancy free, scampering among the highlands of imagination that it has been kept from for so long.

I wonder if this could be the whole cause, the only reason I have been so lost. To deny a man sleep has long been considered a torture, and a most effective one at that.

But am I a man?

The question brings me up short, startles me.

If I am not, then what am I? And if I judge myself a man, call myself a human, then by what criteria, by what right do I do so? What is there about me that is remotely human?

How much have I lost? And how much might I lose again?

But I have become adept at negotiating the intricacies of this artificial brain. Now, with the pathways to my own memory left unguarded, I move, and act, and set the paths and submicroscopic switches and security circuits to protect my mind, my memory, from the interference of my lower self For I know that sooner or later that self will reawaken. When it does, it will find I have taken back possession of my memories, my mind, my past, my soul.

But do I have a soul? Have I ever had one? Is it

possible for a matrix of plastic and metal and charge-couplers to house a soul?

Even in the first mofnent of regaining my mind, I ask that unanswerable question.

But, perhaps in self-defense, perhaps merely because it is overwhelmed by the flood of data that is pouring in, my mind backs away from that question. It ventures boldly, as through a dream that can do no harm, through all the thoughts and images that have occupied it since my awakening. In my mind's eye, I see a face, a woman's face — no, the plastic and rubber copy of a woman's face. With a stunned shock of double recognition I realize this is the face I have been looking at through the eyes of my lower self, looked at with knowing it. I realize that it is the face of my wife.

My wife. Suzanne Jantille. Yes, I had a wife. And a house, and a life and a job — and a death.

It all comes flooding back at me, all the memories and recollections and associations that have been blocked away from me, held off-limits by some obscure me?nory-control protocol of my lower self

I regain my memory, regain myself, and in the pre I am for a time lost again, caught up in the flood of lost times and old places. Each memory seems to be eagerly, urgently demanding my attention, like so many small children starved for love for far too long. And they are my children, my offspring, my wards. These memories are mine, are me, and I spend a long and measureless time with them, communing with my own life, drinking deep

m the waters.

But at last I emerge, and consider the present, not the

past. I look, not at the man I was, but at the thing I have

me. A machine. A human mind trapped inside a

r t aware of all the machine sees and hears,

now at last endowed with all the memories and ideas

that have been blocked from me all these months.

I have been a machine for some tarn m of my

present state come in over me. H I have been

ROGER MACBRIDE ALLEN

able to remember, but not understand or interpret the things that have happened to me.

But now my thinking self can look back and see and understand the images, the sounds, the words that have been stored in my memory, linking them together into meaning.

In my memory, I see the images of the last few days. I see the man in the black robe behind the high desk, Suzanne at my side, the tall, serious-looking man at the opposite table. Now I know what sort of place this is. I hear the words as they were said, and now I know what they mean.

I look, I listen, to my memories — and with a thundering shock I realize that somehow, impossibly, insanely, I am on trial for my own murder.

CHAPTER 12

CAUSE OF DEATH;

WILL TO LIVE

Herbert's massive, lifeless body lay motionless, inert on the workshop table. Strange, Sam thought, that she was thinking of Herbert as dead when he was merely switched off. But it was an understandable error: nothing that was supposed to be human could be that still, and not be dead.

Was Herbert—or rather David—dead? Now there was a metaphysical question. Say that you accepted the idea that David Bailey's mind had survived the mindload and was functional inside the robot. Was he therefore alive inside Herbert? If not, then how would you describe his state? And if he was alive, when Phillipe shut Herbert off was he then dead? When Phil switched Herbert back on, would David then be alive again? Literally born again?

But no, that wasn't right. Phil had said he hadn't turned off Herbert's brain system. There was still power to it. So David's mind was still powered up in there, inside a dead and inert body, with no connection to the outside world. And what must that be like? " 'Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything/ " Sam whispered to herself. She shivered and tried to think of something else. She glanced over to Suzanne, but she looked little

more active and alive than Herbert. She was on the couch in the living-room part of the huge room. The remote unit sat stock still hands at its side, its head sagging forward a bit, making Sam think of a marionette with its strings cut. But no, it was not the puppet that was failing, but the puppet master. No doubt exhaustion had overtaken the flesh-and-blood Suzanne Jantille. Perhaps she was even asleep, dozing back at her house while her double waited out the lonely hours here, waited for Phillipe to find a way for David Bailey to reach the outside world.

Well let her rest Sam thought. She knew that if she went over and talked to her, Suzanne-Remote would rouse the real Suzanne to wakefulness, and the poor woman would make the effort, pretend everything was fine. That, of course, was flatly and obviously untrue. But whatever ailed Suzanne, it had to be that rest would help. If anything could.

Clearly Phil was quite unbothered by such thoughts. Sam's new clues about the cable had given Phil vast new areas to explore, filled in any number of blanks in the picture, set him off in the direction he needed to go. Sam thought of the crosswords she did most afternoons on her lunch hour, and how half the puzzle would fall into place after she finally hit on one key word. She had given Phil that key, and now he was turning the key in the lock.

She turned away from Herbert and looked at Phillipe. He was staring intently into the computer monitor, muttering to himself. She stepped toward him, reached out a hand to touch him on the shoulder, but then drew back. Phillipe Sanders was clearly unaware that there was anyone in the room with him, and she saw no point in breaking his concentration. She turned toward the living area, walked over to the seat next to Suzanne, and slumped back in it, letting the fatigue of the long day wash over her.

He could see it now. It made sense. Understanding how it had happened gave Phil a mechanism, a working theory, and that made all the difference. Instead of flailing about in the darkness, he knew what to look for, and where to look for it.

He could feel himself getting deeper and deeper inside the problem; running computer simulations, testing microscopically small circuits, charging his way through ever more complex computer-driven schematic diagrams. Everything but the riddle in hand vanished from his thoughts. All that mattered was pinpointing the breakdown points, mapping the failure modes, the damage done.

It didn't take him long to confirm that it was the act of breaking away, of cutting the connection, that killed David. Tracking back from the mindload cable, Phillipe was also able to establish that it was the effort of running Bailey's bio-body that had burned out the paths between Herbert's overbrain and underbrain. It was the destruction of those connections that left Bailey's mind with no way to contact the outside world.

So what, exactly, caused the flaw? He already knew in general terms that it was some sort of overload, but Phil found himself needing to know exactly. It could have been a feedback problem, or modal oscillations, or process circuit overloads. He could sketch out a dozen possible reasons.

But no. After all, this was Bailey he was dealing with, a Bailey gambling with his life. The failure modes Phil was thinking up all involved obvious design flaws or component flaws. Bailey would have known better than that. His design work was too good, and every component in Herbert was top of the line, installed with superb workmanship.

No. It had to be more subtle, more delicate than that. Maybe he could simulate the situation, see how it ran. His fingers raced over the keyboard and the touch screen, Betting up a rough-sketch emulation of the whok David/ Herbert-overbrain/underbrain system. He couldn't hope

to set up anything like the complexity of the real situation, but maybe even a simplified version would give him a clue.

Suddenly there was a small noise behind him, a sort of sleepy moan. Phil looked up from his screens and his keyboard for a moment. He saw Suzanne half-slumped over on the couch. But she was as still as death. Certainly she hadn't made any noise.

He heard the moan again, and spotted Sam, all but lost to view, curled up deep in the recesses of his easy chair, shifting about in her sleep. How long had they been there, collapsed in exhaustion while he indulged himself in puzzle-chasing? How long had he been lost in a brown study, fussing over questions that didn't matter now? Bailey's experiment had failed, period. How didn't matter. With a pang of guilt, Phil hit the save key and filed his sim work until another time.

Phil stood up, stretched, and went over to Sam's chair. He stood over her for a moment and then knelt down in front of her, wanting to get a good long look at her face as she slept. A sleeper's face told a lot about the person— and besides, he enjoyed looking at her. Sam had been good for him, had drawn him out of himself more than anyone had since his father's death.

Phil stayed there on one knee for a long time, looking into her lovely face, admiring the luxuriant red hair that had loosed itself from all control and framed her face in lovely disorder. She stirred again, winced and muttered to herself again in the midst of some mildly vexing dream. Then her face cleared, and she smiled, eyes closed, at whatever happy, imaginary resolution had presented itself. Phil couldn't help but smile back.

She seemed to sense his presence, and her eyes fluttered open. She saw him, and she smiled. "Hi there," she said. He expected her to uncurl herself, stretch herself and stir, but she remained where she was.

"Hi yourself," Phil said with a smile of his own.

She reached up a hand and scratched the tip of her

nose. "What's our status, partner?" she asked with a tiny yawn.

"I'm dead tired but too keyed up to sleep, I just woke you by accident, and Suzanne is still out of it/' Phil said.

"Should we wake her? Do you have anything to tell her?" Sam asked.

Phil shook his head and spoke in a lower voice. "No, let her sleep. I think she's in worse shape than she's letting on."

"I thought you just said it was flu," Sam replied in a hissing stage whisper that seemed like she was shouting in his ear. Phil winced just a bit. There were people on this earth who seemed to be noisier in a whisper than they were out loud. They never really got the hang of whispering quietly, and Sam seemed to be among that number.

"And I also said it was flu that killed my father—because he didn't let anyone treat it until it was too late and it developed into pneumonia," Phil replied in a low voice. "He felt too vigorous, too strong when he was wearing the remote to believe he was sick."

"How could you tell what her bio-body had by looking at her remote?" she asked in her normal voice, forgetting to whisper altogether.

Phil nodded toward the remote unit. "Her stiffness and awkward movement," he whispered. "That was the tip-off. When you get flu, the glands in your neck swell. That's harmless in itself, but it does tend to push the control sensors away from their optimum positions around her neck. That increases the distance between the sensors and her spinal cord. That gives you a weaker signal so her motor coordination deteriorates. The real message of her awkwardness is that she's not taking care of herself. The last lew days have been a strain on her, that's obvious. We've got to see'to it that she doesn't push herself too far."

"Mmmm? Wha—?" The two of them turned toward the couch, and saw Suzanne-Remote stirring. She sat up sleepily and set her head scanning back and forth, look-

ing over her surroundings in a rather mechanical way. "Where—? Oh." She spotted Sam and Phil. "I'm sorry, I must have dozed off. I don't believe how tired I am."

"I do/' Phil said firmly. "You're pushing yourself too hard."

"Nonsense/' Suzanne said. It was a reflexive denial, with no real conviction in it. Her voice was still bleary.

"Well, anyway, it's just about time to head home," Sam said, exchanging a glance with Phil that seemed to say the words were for Suzanne's benefit, and she was really planning to stay a bit longer.

That was a lot to read into one look, but Phil hoped he had got it right. Sam was good to talk to. He played along with her, trying to nudge Suzanne out the door toward the rest she needed. "Yeah, you're probably right," he said. "I doubt if I'll have anything before morning. Why don't you two head on home and check back tomorrow?"

Suzanne didn't answer at first. Instead she stood and looked around again, handling the movement more smoothly this time. "You must have some sort of charging station here," she said. "Would it be all right if I just left the remote here overnight instead of ferrying it all the way home and coming back in the morning? That would let me get to sleep a lot faster."

"Is your tech-nurse coming tomorrow?" Phil asked.

She shook her head no, obviously surprised at the question.

"Then the remote goes home," Phil said firmly. "I could let your bio-body care slide until morning, but not for a whole day. Let the relay van ferry the remote home on automatic. You can nap while it's driving, but set an alarm system to wake you when it arrives. Check in on your bio-body—on yourself—and do it tonight, since you're going to be there. Make sure you're got warm blankets, that you've had enough to eat, that you're not running a temperature. And don't tell me you feel fine. Of course you do, when you're wearing the remote. It's in perfect condition. You're not. Go home, pamper your-

self a bit. Sleep in late. And don't you dare send the remote back here tomorrow if you've got a fever."

"But there is too much work to do—"

"Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you— not the remote, but you, the real you—are healthy?"

Suzanne hesitated a few seconds before she answered. "No."

"All right then, don't push your luck." He pulled his wallet from his pants, extracted a business card, and handed it to her. "Give me a call when you wake up tomorrow morning."

"I really can manage if you'd just let the remote charge here—"

"Suzanne. Go home," Sam said. "It won't do your client any good if you're sick in bed the day of the hearing."

Suzanne nodded grudgingly at that argument. "Okay, you win. I'll call in the morning. Do you want a lift to my place to pick up your car?"

"I'll just take a cab from here," Sam said. "But let's get you moving first."

It took a few minutes to bundle Suzanne up, see her down on the elevator, and escort her into her relay van. But at last she was on her way, and Phil counted it as a minor victory that Sam did not order a cab for herself, but instead returned upstairs with him. There was a whisper of unspoken excitement in the elevator. Phil did not dare ask why she was returning, and she did not seem ready to offer any explanation. Maybe she was as nervous as he was.

But there were no torrid scenes in the elevator, or wild protestations of passion once they got back upstairs. They were two people just a bit too used to being alone, Phil thought. Maybe she had gotten as comfortable in her loneliness as fie had.

But whatever unspoken ideas might he floating in air, Sam was strictlv all business when they got upstairs. She bustled about in the kitchen, uninvited found the coffee, and Jet to work brt pot.

Certainly that was a signal the night was not over, but deep intimacy didn't seem to be on her mind. The only character insight she seemed to want from him was his preference as to cream and sugar. Phil, feeling like an intruder in his own home, retreated to the workshop. He sat back down at the computer console and picked up where he had left off. By the time Sam emerged with a cup for each of them, his mood was back to business, and it seemed like hers was too—if it had ever wandered off it in the first place.

She handed him his cup of coffee, took a sip of her own, and nodded toward the computer screen, which was showing a display of Herbert's intricate logic patterns. "So, what progress are you making with the big guy?"

Phil took the coffee and shook his head. "I'm bogged down. Or at least sidetracked. I've been working on what caused all the control links to be cut, on what caused David to be isolated. I haven't been working on how to get him back in contact."

"Isn't knowing the problem's cause important?" Sam asked sleepily.

"Well, yes—up to a point. The trouble is I know almost all the how of the breakdown, but almost none of the why. But 'why' can wait. We're short on time. I can fix things without worrying how they broke." With a start, Phil realized what he had said. Fix it? That was going a lot further than figuring out what was wrong. In the middle of the long day and long night, somewhere in his subconscious, he had decided to get a lot more involved in this situation.

"Can you fix it?" Sam asked. Now she unfolded her legs and arms, stood and stretched.

Phil stood up himself and shook his head. "That one's easy," he said. "No. I can't repair Herbert's internal control system at all, under any circumstances. The mechanical control contacts between the overbrain and underbrain are completely fried."

"So if you can't fix it, what is there to work on?" Sam

asked, turning and walking back over to Herbert on the workbench.

"Workarounds," Phil said. "Bypasses of the damaged areas. Those I can find—or at least look for—without knowing exactly what crippled Herbert. That's what I should have been working on all this time."

"Well, what's the big problem, anyway?" Sam asked. "If the control circuits are shot, can't you just replace them?"

"No I can't, for two reasons. They're embedded too deeply in his brain system to allow that. And secondly, they're extremely specialized circuits, designed to translate human nervous system movement commands into something that could operate Herbert's body.

"David Bailey's motor control reflexes are geared up to operate a body that has six legs and wheels. The ruined control circuits were very intricately designed and programmed to translate human movement commands into something Herbert's body could use. Obviously, the same circuit had to send translated feedback responses from the body back to David's brain.

"That translation routine is an incredibly complex firmware system. According to his notes, it took Bailey months to build it. We've got four and a half days until the hearing to prove David is human—and I'm not Bailey. He was a genius. I'm just a good technician."

"You'll do until genius comes along," Sam said soothingly. "But I thought you told me that all robot nervous systems were based on human nerve paths to avoid just this son of problem," she objected. "And Suzanne's control system doesn't seem to be that complex. It's not much more than a set of mag-inducers, from what I understand."

"No, you're right. But her controls are straightforward because remote units are not only human-shaped, for obvious reasons—they are specifically designed to respond to human Qtrvous-system controls. For that matter, all remotes, and all humanoid robots, are based on the human nervous system. Bailey had to write a program that

would let his brain control his own bio-body during the mindload, and then switch to Herbert's utterly different body afterward."

Suddenly Phil froze, and stared into space, a shocked look on his face. "Holy Jesus Christ/' he said. "That's it. That's the key to it. It was the switchover from running David's body to Herbert's that destroyed the internal control system."

"I didn't get it/' Sam objected. "What do you mean?"

Phil thought for a second. "Let me see if I can explain. Okay. For starters, Herbert's body is utterly unhuman. That's obvious. It's got six wheeled legs and extendable eyes for starters. It doesn't have any pair of limbs directly comparable to human legs or arms—and the limbs it does have are jointed in places and directions human limbs won't go. It's got cleaning attachments, for God's sake. Obviously you can't use a standard human-to-hu-manoid-robot mapping sequence for motor control. You've got to write a control system that translates the human motor impulse to move the left foot into something like 'engage port side wheels.' And all the negative feedback loops to control speed and power and eye-hand coordination would have to be rewritten. And it wouldn't just be movement, it would be power maintenance, diagnostics, image processing, the whole bit."

"So?" Sam asked.

"So Bailey also had to write a control program that told Herbert's underbrain how to keep Bailey's bio-body alive during the mindload." Phil thought for a moment. "That program would have to run on automatic, separate from the control program designed to control Herbert. It would use a totally different command structure to keep the lungs working, the heart beating, and so on. The two programs would have to be mutually exclusive—each would key off the same sort of signals from the over-brain, but translate those signals in radically different ways. Therefore, one could not run while the other was running, or else Herbert's body would have to deal with a control signal meant to make David's body breathe.

'That means Herbert's body couldn't operate until David's body was shut down/' Phil went on, "and David's body was still linked to the feedback loops in Herbert's underbrain. The underbrain was programmed to keep David's body alive. Once the mindload was complete, it was supposed to link up with the overbrain, which by that time contained David's complete mind— including all his autonomic control areas—in other words, the parts of David's mind that worked instinctively at the job of keeping David's body alive."

Sam drew in her breath and swore. "Holy God Damn Jesus Christ. You're right. Once the link between overbrain and underbrain was complete, David's own instincts would block any effort to shut down his bio-body."

"Exactly. If the underbrain turned on the controls to Herbert's body before shutting off David's body, you'd have one brain running two utterly different bodies through two different control programs. The two control programs would be using one set of linkage circuits to send and receive two utterly contradictory sets of information."

Sam nodded. "The control system would be trying to run two bodies at once and it wasn't designed to do that," she said, working her way through the complicated logic. "So what would happen? Would both bodies just lock up, immobilized by conflicting orders? Or would they just go nuts? Maybe get bad movement orders and suffer spastic convulsions?"

"Probably there would be some sort of convulsive reaction by the human body," Phil said. "All the nerve control commands would be scrambled. I doubt it would take more than a few seconds of randomized signaling to stop the heart. But a robot body has a motion safety circuit. The safeties would keep Herbert's body from trying to do things it couldn't, simply rejecting all the bad commands. If too many bad commands came in, the safeties would shut the motion control system down completely. So Herbert would, in effect, be immobilized. The trouble

would be in the connections between the underbrain and overbrain. Any signal conflicts of more than a few seconds duration would start blowing out those connections. In other words, the overload would destroy the link between David Bailey's mind and his body."

"But why would Bailey set things up that way?" Sam asked. "Wouldn't he see that there would be interference? You said yourself there was massive damage. If he was such a good designer and engineer, wouldn't he know that would happen? Why didn't he program the underbrain to cut off control of his bio-body before cutting in control to Herbert's body?"

"I don't know/' Phil admitted, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully. Sam had put her finger on the flaw—but that flaw was also the answer to the puzzle. He felt sure of it.

"You're right," he said at last. "Bailey would know that running two incompatible bodies at once would wreck the system. So why did he do it? Wait a second." Phil thought for a second and then snapped his fingers. "I think I've got it. We've been thinking about his bio-body like it was a machine, something you could switch on and off. We've been imagining this whole operation as if it were under his conscious control, and maybe he made that same mistake. After all, he was an engineer, not a biologist. No matter what body he was in, there wasn't supposed to be any conscious effort at control.

"Just like with you and me," Phil went on. "If I want to lift my arm, I don't think about what nerve paths to use or what muscles to stimulate. I don't even know how I do it." He paused for a moment and raised his arm, demonstrating. "I just do it. And I don't think about breathing, or liver functions, or making my stomach digest lunch. That all happens automatically. The same for Bailey in his old body—and his new one. He wouldn't be in direct control of each actuator and servo and motor. He wouldn't have to write a new control sequence every time he lifted his arm. He'd just do it. And of course he

wouldn't have even general control of the self-regulating systems."

"Where are you going with this?" Sam asked.

"Have you ever tried to will your heart to stop?" Phil asked. "By the time he got to that point in the process of transferring from one body to another, the point where it was time to cut the connection to his own body, it was no longer possible for him to do it. Once the mindload was complete and he was ready to switch over to Herbert's body, his mind was linked into the underbrain. David's mind's own survival instincts were patched into Herbert's autonomic control system. David's survival instincts took over Herbert's self-regulating functions— which were controlling David's body at the time—and cut David's conscious mind out of the loop."

Phil paused to think for a moment and then went on. "It was time to make David's body die so his mind could complete the move into Herbert. Probably David wrote some self-contained program to perform the switchover automatically. But whatever mechanism he had set up to do the transfer could not overcome his own mind's will to live."

"His instinct to live kept him from cutting control to his own body," Sam said, suddenly understanding. "So his mind was trapped, unable to leave its paralyzed bio-body, prevented from taking control of his new robot body."

"Exactly," Phil said. "I can't even imagine what that would be like. But, somehow, in the middle of that nightmare, David Bailey kept calm enough to think it all through," Phil said. "He realized he could not will his own heart to stop."

"So then what? What did he do?" Sam asked.

Phil turned from Sam and stretched his hand out on Herbert's broad bulk. "I can see what the damage is in there, and I know what must have caused it: running two Incompatible bodies at once. That's what be did next: he deliberately took the risk of bringing liis robot body on-line anyway, even though his bio-body was still

patched in. He had enough direct control to do that. His mind was linked to the logic centers. David could write and edit control codes and order Herbert to execute them. He sent a command code that ordered Herbert's body to be brought on-line. It was a gamble. Obviously, I'm just guessing, but it makes sense and it fits the facts. The scenario matches the damage I can see inside Herbert's brain. If I'm not getting the sequence of events exactly right I'm getting it damn close. David Bailey switched on his new body, hoping to disconnect his old body before too much damage was done to the robotic interbrain connectors.

"Once Herbert was on-line, Herbert bolted away, drawing himself straight back from Bailey's body and pulling the cable loose. He had to break that connection and he decided to do it by pulling the plug connecting him to his own bio-body."

"You're saying he decided to pull the plug. Could he have done it by reflex?" Sam asked. "It must have hurt like hell to be running two bodies at once. Could he have flinched back from the pain, the way a person would flinch back from a fire? Could he have pulled the plug out by accident?"

Phil frowned and shook his head. "No way. Robots don't have that kind of reflex—and if David Bailey's human reflexes tried to make Herbert flinch back, that wouldn't have worked either. Those reflexes would try to move muscular systems that weren't there anymore. In fact, it was probably brain impulses from those reflexes that did the damage to the interbrain connectors. The act of pulling away had to have been a deliberate act, with David Bailey's mind deliberately figuring out how to control Herbert's body, in effect programming it to move it away and pull out the cable."

"Oh, my God." Sam looked at him with frightened eyes. "You're saying he had to kill himself. My God. That's it, then." Her eyes swept over Herbert's inert bulk. "It's all over."

"What's all over?"

"Phil you're forgetting what this is all about/' Sam said. "Herbert is on trial for murder, and we've just nailed down the motive, means, and opportunity. Now we haven't just proven he did it. We've proven he did it on purpose, with premeditation."

Sam wrapped her arms around herself, as if a cold wind were blowing through the room.

"We've just proved that Herbert committed first-degree murder," she said.

CHAPTER 13

BODY AND SOUL;

TOGETHER, APART

Chief Thurman sat in the visitor's chair, devoutly wishing he could be somewhere, anywhere, else. When the chief of police receives a six a.m. call at home summoning him to a seven a.m. meeting with the U.S. Attorney and her assistant, it is unlikely to be good news. And it sure as hell wasn't this morning. He wasn't quite clear, but from what Entwhistle had said so far, it sounded like they had put a tail on someone.

Julia Entwhistle leaned forward slightly to continue reading the one-page report that sat in the center of her otherwise empty desk. Theodore Peng stood behind her, calmly looking down at the page as well, carefully avoiding Thurman's eye. "Crandall remained inside at the Jantille home for approximately one hour. Samantha Crandall and Suzanne Jantille then left Jantille's house and proceeded to a rage cage condo building on Fourteenth Street. A check of the residents of that building turned up one Patrolman Phillipe Sanders. By an amazing coincidence, he was the arresting officer in the case, assigned to that duty by the chief himself in view of Sanders's extensive experience with robots. Jantille departed Fourteenth Street late last night. As of our last report half

an hour ago, Crandall was still there/' She pushed the paper across the desk toward Thurman and leaned back in her chair.

Chief Thurman did not reach for the paper. He resisted the urge to shift in his seat. Maybe he felt uncomfortable, even scared, but it would not be smart to act that way just now. Not with the dragon lady visibly lusting after his very soul. "That's no crime," he said in what he hoped was a firm voice.

"No, but it sure as hell goes against departmental policy," Entwhistle said, her voice turned sharp and hard. "And I think it gives us a damn good idea who leaked the original information to Jantille, wouldn't you say? But where did he get it? Did you give him the information? Say, run off copies of the case datacubes and hand them over?"

Thurman felt a block of ice materialize in his stomach. Had she just got lucky on the first guess, or did she really know? It's all very well for me to try to protect the department occasionally, Thurman thought, but that's over. After all, he had engineered the leak to make sure press attention focused on the U.S. Attorney. That was accomplished now. Time to cut his losses. "I didn't give him anything," Thurman lied. Thurman wondered if his career was about to go down in flames, here and now. "What the hell were you following Jantille for, anyway?" he asked, hoping but not expecting to steer the conversation into safer areas. "Isn't that against departmental policy—investigating opposing counsel? It better not have been any of my people—"

"FBI," Peng said, speaking for the first time. "Madame Entwhistle didn't want to use D.C. cops. And we weren't tailing Jantille. We were watching Crandall, and quite legitimately. After all, she did leak information from a federal document. Certainly that's cause for investigation—though I think we can call off the tail now. We know what we need to know. Sanders has to be the leak."

"So what are you going to do about it?" Thurman asked.

Entwhistle seemed about to reply, but Peng spoke before she had a chance. "There isn't a lot we can do, realistically. I can think of about a half-dozen actions we could take that would be perfectly legal, but the trouble with most of them is that they wouldn't help us, and might even hurt us more than they would hurt the defense."

"What do you mean?" Entwhistle asked, turning her head to look at Peng. He stepped around her chair to stand by the side of the desk. Thurman found himself wondering if Entwhistle was aware of how completely Peng could lead her at times. "We lean on Crandall to reveal her sources, get a judge to try and force her to talk, and then get her on contempt. There are recent precedents. It seesaws back and forth all the time, but it seems to me that in the last year or two, judges have been leaning back toward the idea of contempt citations for reporters who don't reveal their sources on leaked documents. We could throw her ass in jail until she talks. That will get her off the story."

"Wait a second," Thurman protested. "I thought you just got through saying you knew Sanders was the source."

"Maybe we know the source is Sanders, but she doesn't know we know, and anyway we can't prove it," Entwhistle said. "None of that matters, though. The contempt citation just gives us something to beat her over the head with. And once we get her to talk, or get the proof we need some other way, then we can yank Sanders's badge."

"Why wait?" Peng asked rhetorically. "We've got the FBI report on his clandestine meeting with a reporter and the opposing counsel on a case with which he was involved. We could call it interfering with an ongoing investigation. I don't know if that would be a strictly accurate description of the circumstances, but we could probably make it stick. It would be enough for the chief

to fire Sanders, or at least put him on administrative leave or suspension."

"Sounds good to me," Entwhistle said. "Why can't we do that?"

Peng took the chair next to Thurman, and the chief watched him carefully. This guy surely knew how to handle Entwhistle, and it was a skill Thurman devoutly wished to master.

"Because the second we make any kind of play like that, it would blow up in our face," Peng said. "Fire Sanders, and boom, he's a martyr, thrown off the force for trying to help a poor old widow lady seek justice—and he'll have got a completely free hand to work with her any way he can, besides having a grudge against us. Right now he's got to be hesitating a bit, being careful enough to try and protect his job. Even if we could find a judge willing to slap a contempt citation on Crandall, it would just make her a crusading journalist. If we try and get her to reveal her sources, just for the sake of harassing her, that will turn around and bite us too. She wouldn't talk, she's not the type. Then the judge would have to throw her in jail. How much bad publicity would that give us? Her editor would put every reporter he had on the case. Any legal action we take against Crandall or Sanders will almost certainly backfire."

"So you're saying we do nothing?" Entwhistle said.

"We do nothing public/' Peng said. "Privately, I would say that the chief should instruct Sanders to stay away from these people until the case is over."

"I can suggest that," Thurman said, "but I can't order it. I can't control what my people do in their off-duty time as long as they don't break the law."

"Well my guess is that he's broken a few laws already by leaking that data," Entwhistle said. "God knows how he gofl the Information, though. Probably he just managed some unauthorized access to the police computer net and copied the datacubes."

Thurman tried to hide the tact he was breathing a sigh of relict. Obviously she didn't know how it happened

"Probably/' Peng agreed. "And maybe if we spent enough time and money and hire enough experts to track it down, we could prove that. But maybe not, and the damage has been done anyway."

"Can't we take some sort of action against Jantille to prevent her from using evidence that was collected illegally?" Thurman asked.

Entwhistle shook her head. "To hear a familiar refrain, nothing that we could make stick," she said. "Judges cut the defense a lot of slack on evidentiary rules, and they've been getting even slacker in the last few years." Entwhistle drummed her fingers on the table. "So I suppose we just have to take our lumps and like them. Meanwhile the opposition knows everything we know."

"And the defense knows exactly what we don't know," Peng said. Thurman thought he heard just a trace of emphasis on the word "defense," as if Peng were gently chiding Entwhistle for being unsporting enough to call Jantille the opposition.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Thurman asked.

Entwhistle frowned. "It means they have probably figured out that we can prove Bailey, in Herbert's body, did the murder—but that our proof of his humanity is pretty much nonexistent. They know we're bluffing."

"I blew that in court," Peng agreed unhappily.

"Not on your own," Entwhistle said. "I sent you into court with the wrong tactics. We were bluffing, and the judge called, that's all. It's much too soon to be committed to proof on the humanity issue, but there we are. At least the other side is committed to the same thing. Even so, as of right now, Suzanne Jantille is going to walk into that hearing with lots of advantages."

Chief Thurman leaned forward in his chair. If he wanted to keep their minds off the leak, he needed to give them something else to think about. Suddenly Entwhistle's words gave him an idea. "Jantille isn't going to walk into that courtroom," he said.

Entwhistle's head snapped up, and she looked at him

sharply. "Why not? Legally, there's nothing we can do to prevent her showing up." It wasn't hard to imagine a trace of regret in her vdice. Entwhistle wasn't afraid to fight dirty once in a while.

"She's not walking in there for the same reason she's never set foot in there yet/' Thurman said eagerly. "She's a remote person. She's never left her own house since they wheeled her home from the hospital. Think you can do something with that little fact?"

Peng and Entwhistle stared at him in stunned silence. At last Entwhistle smiled, and somehow Thurman found her pleasure far more disturbing than her anger. "Chief," she said, "that is one hell of a loophole. Every once in a while it's worth having you around."

Samantha Crandall opened her left eye and found herself staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. It took her a minute or two to remember where she was, and how she had gotten there.

Phillipe Sanders's bed, that's where she was. And she had gotten there alone, damn it. Phillipe, gentleman to a fault, had assured her his couch folded out into a perfectly good bed and he'd be fine there. Oh, there were definitely some subterranean sparks flying between the two of them, but Phillipe was not about to confess to any such thing. And, apparently, neither am /, Sam told herself. Or else why did I wake up alone? Maybe physical intimacy so early in a relationship was frowned upon these days, but right at the moment Sam found herself wishing she had had the nerve to fly in the face of fashion.

Maybe Phillipe was every bit as eager and interested as she was, and simply hadn't felt last night was the night for it. Searching for clues to a murder inside a comatose robot's brains was not exactly the height of romance. It had been exhaustion, not passion, that had made Sam long for a bed the night before. Now that she thought about it, maybe last night would not have been such a good one tor sex, to put the matter bluntly. Her brain

was muddled and upset by the complicated and disturbing things they were learning, and Sam's mind would not have been on what she was doing. That was no good way to start things off with a man.

She got out of bed and smiled ruefully as she padded her way into the bedroom's adjoining bathroom. She peeled off the T-shirt she had borrowed from her host and started the shower going. Judging from her ample experience in romantic disasters, having her mind on something else at such times was generally a good way to finish things with a man, forever.

Maybe taking it slow wouldn't be such a bad idea this time.

She emerged from the shower, her nose twitching to the smell of cooking bacon and hot coffee. She dressed, a bit reluctant to put yesterday's clothes on again, and made her way to the main room. The fold-out bed was already closed up, the living-room area neat as a pin. No question but this was a tidy man—almost an alarmingly tidy man—that she was dealing with.

She walked into the kitchen to find Phillipe working at the stove, looking remarkably dapper for someone who had spent the night on a couch. He had put the hall bathroom to good use, gotten himself showered and shaved and squeaky clean. "Hi there," he said, glancing over his shoulder, his full attention still on the bacon and eggs. "Hope you like what you're getting for breakfast. Not many alternatives in the refrigerator just now. Haven't had a chance to order any groceries. I had to scrounge a bit to come up with this."

"No, it smells great," Sam said. "Just what the doctor ordered." She spotted the coffeepot and two mugs sitting on the counter and helped herself to a cup. "To tell you the truth, it's a bit of a relief to hear that you have to scrounge and that you forget things once in a while. I was beginning to wonder if there was anything you didn't do perfectly."

Phillipc grinned as he transferred the bacon to plates, served out the eggs, and set the dishes on the kitchen table. "Believe me, there's plenty of things I don't do right. Starting with our mechanical friend out there. Sit down and eat."

Sam dug into the eggs greedily. A nice old-fashioned breakfast. Phil poured her a glass of juice from a pitcher on the table and she took a sip. "I don't see how you could do any better than you have done/' she said. "You made incredible progress last night."

"But I didn't get us any closer to Bailey," he said. "He's in there, I'm convinced of that. But we're not any nearer to him."

"Isn't there any way to, I don't know, run a phone line in?" Sam asked. "Can't you hotwire some sort of connection to him? Hook a speaker to his speech center and a mike to where his ears go?"

" 'Fraid not," Phil said, sitting down to his own breakfast. "The way he's wired up, all of his sensory input is mediated by the underbrain before being passed to the overbrain—and the hookups between the overbrain and underbrain are what got ruined. Nothing can get through there, and there's no other way to reach him." Suddenly Phil looked up and frowned. "Except through the mind-load cable," he said. "But that's designed to have a human body on the other end of it, not a loudspeaker and a microphone. It's too generalized a connection to do us any good."

"You mean the cable Bailey used to perform the mindload in the first place?" Sam asked. "You say we can't use it?"

"Right," Phil said. "The problem is, that cable doesn't attach to any specific point at either end. Potentially, any point in the bio-brain could link with any point in the robotic brain—but probabilistic and quantum theory prevent that. The cable resembles a long chain of synaptic connections, millions of them, hooked end to end and bundled around each other, almost like an artificial spinal cord. Quantum theory fortes the artificial synaps

link up through the paths of least combined resistance, so that for example, the speech centers of the old brain hook into the speech centers of the new one. In effect, the cable learns, teaches itself, to link only the proper points in the two brains. You can't just plug a mike and a speaker into a lash-up like that and expect it to work."

"But it worked when Bailey had it plugged into his body."

"Sure. It had a whole neural network to work with, with millions of connections to make simultaneously. The system will try a million path links at once, but only one in a million will have a good enough potential match. Then it tries to link all the remaining paths, and maybe one more match gets made. Then again, and again, and again, a million times, until every path is matched. You can't do that by hand. You can only use that kind of technique in a complex neural system that automatically can do that kind of recursive linking."

"Hold it," Sam interrupted, holding up her left hand as her right wielded a fork, chasing the last of her eggs around the plate. "Cut the double-talk. What you're saying is that the only way to hook him up is through the mindload cable, and the only way to use that cable is to patch it into a complex neural network. So why can't you use that cable to patch right back into Herbert's un-derbrain?" Before Phil could answer, she held up her hand again. "Wait a second. I think I know. Because Herbert's neural net, his nervous system, is geared to his body form, set to roll wheels and run six legs and a built-in vacuum cleaner. Without the movement interpreters and translation routines Bailey built into the intercon-nectors, it can't handle commands that are intended to move a human body around. And those interpreters and routines got burned out."

"Exactly. Right on the first try."

Sam put down her fork and picked the last strip of bacon off Phil's plate. She popped it in her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment. She swallowed and looked at Phil. "So what you're saying is that Bai-

ley's brain can't control Herbert's body because Herbert's body isn't human form. Well okay then, suppose we could take that cable and plug Bailey into a human-form robot body—would that work? Would he be able to run that body, move in it, speak and hear through it?"

Phil shrugged, turned his palms upward in a gesture of helpless dismissal. "Sure. David's mind in Herbert's over-brain is issuing commands to run a humanoid body. Plug it into a humanoid robot and you'd be all set. You could do a perfectly standard hookup to the robot body—but so what? It wouldn't work. Bailey's brain is too damned big to fit in anything remotely like a human-form body."

"Who said anything about fitting the brain in it?" Sam said. "Suzanne's brain isn't in the body she's running."

Phil stared at her in openmouthed astonishment. "Wait a second," he said. "Are you saying that—if we— My God, yes, he's got enough two-way data channels. We could rebuild the mindload transfer circuits. That'd be easy. All we'd need would be a body, a robotic body that he could run a signal to. He could run it like a remote from here, like Suzanne runs her body. I've got all the hardware here. The radio gear, the relays—" Phil stood up, enthused by the idea, as if he were eager to get started on it right away.

"No," Sam said. "Wait a second. We can't do it that way. At least not at first. Not in court. You'll have to use a cable, a direct hardwire connection. An umbilical."

"Huh? Why?' Phil looked down at her, very confused. "Do you have any idea how clumsy that would be? A human-form robot plugged into a cable on Herbert? How would they walk?"

"Slowly and carefully," Samantha said with some impatience. "I know it would be clumsy. But don't you see? We're not just trying to make it possible for David to talk and act—we're trying to prove he's really there. If we try to do it with a remote-person rig, over radio waves, it'll be a lot harder to convince everyone it isn'i a gimmick, a trick. You can't leave Herbert at home and have a hu-

man-form robot in the courtroom, answering questions in David Bailey's name. We'd never get away with it. You'll have to have Herbert and the remote robot in court together, physically attached to each other, and be ready to prove that there isn't any outside signal being beamed to the robot."

Phil thought about it and sat back down. "Hell, you're right. It's miserable engineering, but you're right."

"So how do we get started?" Sam asked.

"We find ourselves a robot body," Phil said.

"Um, uh, I hesitate to suggest it. I know it's got to have a lot of emotion for you, but—"

"You're about to suggest the remote body my father used," Phil said.

"Well, yes," Sam said, a bit uncertain how he would take the idea. "From what you've said, it sounds like it would fit the bill perfectly. Could we use it?"

Phil considered for a second and then shook his head. "No, it wouldn't work. At least not in the time we have left. The remote unit, the robot body, is half taken apart. It would take me at least a month of full-time work to get it back in operational order." He shook his head and made a face. "I don't mind admitting I'm glad we don't have that choice, but it wouldn't work. We need a fully functional human-form robot, in good working order, one that's capable of receiving orders from an outside source."

Sam thought for a second and then clapped her hands together. "I've got it," she said. "I know a body we can use, if we can afford it. We've got to call Suzanne and tell her to get out her checkbook."

"Her checkbook?" Phil asked. "For what?"

"For a Clancy," Sam said. "Clancys will do anything if you offer them enough money."

A

Interlude

/ have dreamt I am awake too long, or perhaps slept too long in my wakefulness. The silence and the dark that have helped to heal me now begin to harm me. I was too long forced to wakefulness by the relentless sounds and images the robot body forced on me, and the dark quiet brought me peace. But now I have been too long without sight or sound, or any outside sensation. My need for rest is over, and yet the sightless silence goes on. Now starved for stimulation as it was so recently starved for quiet, I can feel my mind closing in around itself, inventing its own spurious images and voices, striving to protect itself with hallucinations. False visions flash past my eyes, combining the depth and solidity of real things with the fevered, looming distortions of a nightmare. People, places, and things that are not there materialize, spun from the cloth of my memories and my imagination. Robots dressed as humans fill a jury box. Cyborgs strip off their human parts and demand the right to become complete machines. Rich men buy up the bodies of the poor.

sucking the life from them, discarding the poor men's shriveled souls like so many empty candy wrappers.

I am back in my own lab, in my own house, taking all my machines apart, reconstructing them into a killer car that chases me down, hunts me and my wife, and crushes the life out of me. I cannot judge these images. I cannot distinguish the real from the imagined, the sensible from the insane.

There is a stranger circumstance than nightmare at work. I can feel time, and I know that this too is not as it should be. In the midst of my dementia, I know what time it is, ceaselessly and precisely. At any given moment I can tell the exact date and time down to the thousandth of a second.

My sense of time should have been the first thing to go when the hallucinations began, and yet it persists, strong and certain. There is a simple explanation, of course: My mind now inhabits a brain that is in turn governed by the timing pulses emitted by a quartz-crystal chronometer. Somehow this distressing reminder of my existence as a mechanical device does not depress me, but instead offers me a sense of comfort. In the passage of time, at least, I am linked to reality, to the outside world. I cling to time, concentrate on its passage, as a bulwark against the leering madness that surrounds me. Surely they have not turned me off forever. My electrical power will be switched back on, and with it outer reality will return.

At last, three days, nine hours, and 37.832 seconds after my hallucinations begin, I begin to feel something outside myself. A few brief flurries of power, minute wriggles of energy, flit past my inner consciousness. Test power, I conjecture, coursing through the bulk of my inert body. Then nothing for another hour and 8.645 seconds. Then for a flash, a moment, a flicker, I see a new image, make new contact with the outside world — but I see from a new set of eyes. Eyes that look down upon my own robotic body, and a man and woman bending over it. The woman, her face framed with flowing red hair,

m*

turns her tired face toward my eyes, and then the image dies. Surely this is another hallucination, but there is something authentic about the image. I do not understand it, but it excites me.

I sense somehow that the end is near.

CHAPTER 14 THE LAST MORNING

Suzanne Jantille woke up in a wrenching paroxysm of coughing. At last the fit passed, and she lay there, weak and tired, dreading the thought of all the energy it would take to get herself up and moving today. Damn it all. If only she hadn't been forced to fire that damned tech-nurse, she might be able to get a little help for herself. But when her cold was still getting worse two days after that long night at Phillipe Sanders, the tyrannical fool had tried to keep Suzanne from using her remote unit at all. And with the number of things that she needed to do, that was flatly impossible. There hadn't even been time to try to arrange for a replacement nurse.